


Ja'ak

by Trebia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dark!Rey, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Force Bond, IT AIN'T INCEST, It's officially slowburn, Knights of Ren!Rey, Master-Apprentice Dynamics, Pre-TFA AU, Reylo - Freeform, Softcore Coup D'état, hold onto your knickers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-15 06:49:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 58,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5775766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trebia/pseuds/Trebia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She refused to remain <em>nobody.</em></p><p>Or, how to carve out an empire in six acts. It's work suited for two pairs of hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ACT I: The Abduction, Part I

**Author's Note:**

> **HOLONET QUERY:**   
>  **Ja’ak - (keyword, Sith spoken language)**
> 
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> **TRANSLATION, GALACTIC STANDARD:**  
>  **I am free.**
> 
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>   
> 
> 
> Art by [Elithien](http://elithien.tumblr.com)

**ACT I: The Abduction, Part I**

 

**32 ABY**

 

 **J** akku’s desert storms are said to have a fierceness to them that make them a living thing. The name the Teedos give to the turbulent, roaring thunder and winds that happen during these storms is _X’us’R’iia_ , named after their god. They say that the roar of the winds and the clap of thunder is R’iia’s breath, whistling through the skeletons of downed starships in the Graveyard of Giants. Any lengthening of the storm’s life is interpreted as terrible vengeance R’iia exacts for whatever sin the Teedos visit upon each other.

 

Rey doesn’t believe in such superstitions, but she can’t deny the ferocity of this particular storm. It’s unrelenting and shows no sign of letting up after nearly three days. The longest on record is said to be a month-long storm that consumed entire outposts in the Goazon Badlands. Stories of mothers shrouding their children’s heads in clothes wetted with precious water to keep the sand clear of their mouthes and eyes during the night cycle only to wake up and find them suffocated under piles of sand in their shoddy tents—these are the tales that fill the tapcafs and bazaars in the region when black, rolling thunderheads are spotted over the dunes.

 

When she spotted such a phenomenon during her morning scavenging near the Sinking Fields three days back, she’d immediately sided with her instincts and loaded up what she had on her speeder before starting the trek back home. Unfortunately the _X’us’R’iia_ was quicker than her and Rey’d found shelter in the familiar remains of the _Ravager,_ ‘least she be swallowed by the angry winds rumored and confirmed to strip flesh from bone by seasoned scavengers who’d seen such happenings. 

 

Her burner lets out a spit of flame as Rey breaks the seal on the vacuum packet containing the second to last of her field rations. She’s stretched out her stores by a few days by eating only once every eighteen hour cycle. Packing extra rations was a necessity when you headed so many klicks inward in the ship graveyard. You never knew when Jakku was going to try and swallow you whole. Take for instance this very scenario she was living right this second. 

 

She fishes out a strip of rehydrated meat from the deflated packet, the suspiciously green substance covering it sizzling on the fryer once she sets it on the hot metal. Rey uses a piece of clean scrap to flip it, sucking the heat out of the burn she gets for her trouble when some of the meager fat sizzles off the strip of meat. She didn’t think to bring her only fork along so she makes do with the long lathe of durasteel she’d stripped off a control panel for the turbolasers.

 

Around her, the _Ravager_ howls with the sounds of the _X’us’R’iia_ raging outside of its hull. Rey has made a small encampment on a dune of sand that has gathered in what she knows was once the forward batteries of the crippled _Executor_ -class super star destroyer. 

 

She chances a glance at her speeder behind her, parked in the darkness outside of the glow of her burner’s tiny flame. Rey had already gutted what was still useful along the fringe of this sector. Her bike’s cargo net is already weighted down with bartering finds and scrap she will save for herself. 

 

Grease coats her brow, now pore-deep after years of simple oil baths since water is far too precious to waste on bathing like the few wealthy (if you can consider owning a lean-to of your own constituting wealth) enjoy with their water surpluses every week. When she lifts a hand to scrub at her itching head, her hand comes away only slightly grimy with oil. 

 

Rey digs her teeth into the tough strip of meat once both sides are thoroughly greened, oddly reminiscent of the time she boiled leather from a scavenged flightsuit’s straps to fill the void of her stomach during a lean year when she was ten. The fryer is cool enough for her to lick the metal once she finishes, careful to swipe every last drop of weak sauce onto her tongue.

 

Her stomach still aches from emptiness, but it’s lessened greatly after her meal. She douses the light on her burner and neatly packs it away on her speeder.

 

This isn’t the longest she’s gone without seeing another being. Still, the solitude creeps into her bones and she has to huddle beneath her bedroll to block out the terrible sounds of R’iia’s howling, Rey’s fingers ever-tightening around her quarterstaff until sleep takes her. 

 

* * *

 

Early in the morning on the fourth day, the _X’us’R’iia_ dies. Of course, the landscape has shifted significantly. It always does after such a storm. Entire dunes taller than even the most prominent bridges of crashed dreadnoughts have been born or destroyed in a matter of days, covering or uncovering new ships. When Rey passes along a familiar trail, she spots at least ten small craft she’s never seen in this sector. They’re already swarmed with scavengers that must’ve set out early to enjoy the spoils of the storm. For certain, as soon as the sun rises it will bring the crowds out to the ship graveyard.

 

When she arrives at Niima Outpost hours later, the bazaar is packed and there seems to be a good bit of activity near the constabulary’s roughhewn building and Niima’s meager spaceport (if you could call a few landing bays a spaceport) situated directly behind it. Rey swallows her curiosity for now and dismounts from the speeder, unhitching the cargo net to let her latest finds spill out onto the sand. She sifts through the burnished desh and plastoid for the best find—an alluvial damper pried from the shattered hyperdrive of a Y-wing. 

 

Rey is careful to camouflage the more valuable finds she wants to save for herself by hiding them behind worthless scrap, tidying it all into a neat pile in the cargo net. She pulls the ignition switch out of her speeder, mindful of thieves, and pockets the key along with the damper in her satchel. Rey starts her way through the bazaar, her mouth watering at the smell of _real meat_ sizzling on a burner at the food stalls. Passing them without nicking a potsticker for herself is a strain—she’d learned early on to not attempt such stunts. The scar across her back from Constable Zuvio’s electrostaff reminds her that while scavengers may be tolerated at Niima Outpost, no one will suffer a thief.

 

“Looks like the dunerat survived the storm,” notes Unkar Plutt once she makes her way to his storefront. Rey grunts, a noncommittal sound that he can interpret as a greeting. She isn’t in the mood for barbs. Her mask remains firmly over her face to guard her expression, which shows only disgust once the junkboss takes the damper from her outstretched hands.

 

Rey keeps her mouth shut, letting the so-called _Blobfish_ turn over her find in his hands as he weighs the worth of the part in his mind. It’s a nickname no scavenger will say to his face if they value their livelihood, but Rey has muttered it plenty a time under her breath while walking away from one of his sour deals—if she were to refuse, she wouldn’t eat that night.

 

“That’s made out of  genuine teniline, not hexophilenine,” Rey insists once Plutt wordlessly shoves only two quarter portions across the worn countertop. “Worth at least twice what you’re giving me.”

 

“You see any other junkboss rushing to make you a better offer, girl? You’ll take two quarter portions and be all the more grateful for my generosity,” he barks out, setting the alluvial damper on a shelf behind him, the damper she’d spent two hours prying from the hyperdrive while the wind and sun beat at her bent back. She’d been so careful not to damage it and lessen the value—every iota of the teniline that comprised it was worth its weight in ration packs.

 

Rey grimaces against her mask, grateful for the concealment. Plutt would’ve snatched the portions back if he could see her expression right this second. She takes the portions offered after that moment of hesitation, giving him her back as she makes for the washing tables to clean the rest of the contents of her cargo net. 

 

“And don’t forget that you still owe me for those three days spent in the storm, dunerat. I know you’re holding out on me if _this_ is all you’ve got to show for your little holiday in the sand,” Plutt shouts over the din of the bazaar. Rey ignores him and goes to retrieve her finds from her speeder. 

 

She’d parked it by the archway leading into the outpost. Rey retrieves the majority of her better finds, stuffing them in her emptied satchel before making her way for the tents that house the washing tables and workbenches. She’ll owe Plutt a portion of her finds for using his facilities, but it’s worth the increases in value of the parts when she does the maintenance and cleaning by her own hands.

 

Rey picks out an unoccupied workbench across from Old Traz, a veteran scrapper who now totters from her tent to this tent, scrubbing parts for the remainder of her life to earn room and board from the Teedo who owns her. 

 

Rey’s own future, in a way. She tries not to see herself in the bend of Old Traz’s arthritic fingers and wrinkles whenever she visits Niima. Lately it’s becoming harder to ignore as the years lengthen and no one, _no one_ returns for her on this rock.

 

“Rey,” croaks out the old woman, blinking rheumy eyes at her once she notices the girl taking the bench opposite. Rey shucks off her head covering and mask, absolutely filthy. Luckily there’s a breeze to take some of the stink away. She resolves to barter for an extra cleansing towelette before she leaves for her bolthole tonight. “Thought you’d been taken by the wind.”

 

“Not hardly—found your old spot in the _Ravager_ and stayed put until the storm died this morning.”

 

Old Traz smiles, the worn lines deepening around her eyes. “Clever of you. The gnaw-jaws must’ve migrated further south—they used to swarm that old ship during the storm season. It’s a wonder you didn’t get bitten.”

 

“Didn’t see a one,” Rey replies, sorting through the pile of desh in her bag until her fingers land on a transpacitor scavenged from the same Y-wing she got the alluvial damper out of. She picks up a plastifibe agitator from the workbench’s toolkit to clear out the ventral surface of the device, powering the agitator up to a low, gentle hum that will shake the sand out of the obscure crannies in the fist-sized hunk of metal.

 

“What’s that commotion over by Zuvio’s office?” Rey tries her best to sound disinterested over the sound of the agitator's buzzing. She can hear groups of other scavengers talking excitedly over her shoulder about the traffic going in and out of Constable Zuvio’s building. Old Traz shrugs, her ragged nails picking out grit on the exhaust manifold she’s working on.

 

“Oh, some shuttle came in this morning as soon as the storm let up. Off-worlders looking for someone, I’d heard,” dodders Traz, shooting a sharp look towards the spaceport.

 

“What sort of off-worlders?” Rey stops, the transpacitor and agitator forgotten in her hands. Her stomach hardens into a knot and suddenly the spaceport needs to be just a little bit more to the left so she can get a look at this shuttle. 

 

“Humans, by the look of them. Certainly not with the New Republic, if I’m any judge. They remind me more of the Imperials from my days, so I'd bet these are the type to avoid,” mutters Traz, her hunched shoulders bending to her task.

 

Curiosity gets the best of Rey an hour later. She sets down her finds near Traz where she knows they’ll be looked after, carefully secreting her second ration pack into the old woman’s empty satchel where she will find it tonight in her tent. After that, it’s simply a short, meandering walk around the stalls before she’s running her fingertips along the familiar sandstone walls of the constabulary’s outpost. She’s struck dumb by the sight of the ship, crowded onto the narrow landing pad and flocked by armed guards.

 

Old Traz had it right when she said they looked like Imperials. Rey’d heard rumors about this First Order—they were rumors best spoken about in hushed whispers in the tapcafs, tellings about remnants of the old Empire that managed to survive and thrive in the deep space of the Unknown Regions after being forced out of the Core by the New Republic.

 

None of that matters out here on the Inner Rim. Jakku is part of the Freestanding Subsectors. Anyone under the junkbosses on this planet are no better than slaves. That much Rey understands after so many years on this backwater.

 

Rey takes a look at the guards and is reminded of the Imperial skeletons littering the wastes. Composite plastoid plating, white in color.  Helmets like the one she’d stripped to get eyepieces for her gear years ago. The stormtroopers mill around the docking ramp at the fore of the shuttle, seemingly oblivious towards the girl hanging around the packing crates fifteen yards away.

 

Her eyes devour every angle of this new, strange ship. The stabilizers are not so dissimilar to a _Theta_ -class shuttle, but the length of them is all _Upsilon_. The durasteel of the hull is burnished to a near black sheen and the twin laser cannons show signs of recent carbon scoring around the muzzle. She's busy circling around to the other side of the building to get a view of the twin ion engine when a flash of light catches on moving chrome.

 

“Her,” she hears a stormtrooper mutter to another, possibly a subordinate. The trooper certainly looks different from the rest, standing a clear head taller than the others with a short cape capping a shoulder. They gesture towards her with their rifle. Rey’s gut wrenches and she tries to act as naturally as possible in walking away.

 

Get her things, get out. Stay in the wastes until this crowd of off-worlders blow through and return to wherever they came from. The plan is sound and solid in her mind.

 

Until she runs into a wall of cloth and armor while turning a corner around the constabulary’s building on her way back to the washing tables. Hands band around her biceps and freeze her in place, lifting her slight weight upwards. Rey is left staring into the flat, scarred steel of a helm. Her limbs turn leaden and she  _can't_ move.

 

“What did I tell you, good sir? Scrappy thing, our Rey. Knew she’d make it back, just as I promised—Unkar Plutt is as good as his word,” gloats the Crolute from behind the man, because it definitely is a male holding her to where her toes would have to scramble for purchase on the ground. If she could budge. 

 

His breathing comes out in short, clipped sounds from a voice modulator. Shrouded from head to toe in black, some form of weapon hanging from a wide belt—her hair rises up on the back of her neck. Rey feels panic knot in her throat as her eyes fix on the narrow slit of his visor. He doesn’t say a word, merely observing as Plutt talks. 

 

Plutt is with Constable Zuvio, both lumbering up to leer at Rey from beneath their caps. The constable looks less amused by the exchange, probably eager to give these off-worlders what they want so they can clear out of the outpost. Plutt is all smiles—something that frightens Rey immeasurably.

 

“She’s a fresh seventeen if she’s a day—still got all of her teeth. Clever hands and a quick mind. Literate, fluent in Binary and Huttese, understands some other languages. Still untouched, if I’ve had anything to say about it to those that were brave enough to come sniffing around her on my watch,” Plutt’s fat fingers stroke his chin contemplatively and Rey feels bile bubble up her throat. “Can fix anything from a droid’s memory core to a blown swoop bike’s manifold. Taught herself to pilot some of the smaller craft, but she’s got a rebellious streak a parsec long. I’ll discount her to you for...fifty thousand,” Plutt wheedles. Rey is half-shocked that the junkboss knows this much about her.

 

What takes her more aback is that he was _bargaining_ for her. 

 

The man in the mask seems equally baffled by Plutt’s offer, as does the trooper with the chrome-gilded armor that joins him to his left, a broad blaster rifle secured in their hands. The off-worlders both tilt their masks curiously at the junkboss. The scavenger feels the slow flex of the man’s fingers under the leather of his gloves before he gingerly sets her on the ground, turning his back on her to speak to Plutt. The leaden feeling dissolves from her limbs.

 

“You seem to be under the impression that this is a negotiation, worm. We’re not haggling over her price. We’re going to _take_ her,” says the masked man, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Rey hears the _whoomp_ of something igniting—the closest thing she’s heard to it in her life is the sound Constable Zuvio’s electrostaff makes while it is amping up. But this is a louder, fiercer roar _._ It still is ringing in her ears when the fat, fleshy folds of Unkar Plutt’s neck are cauterized in a sweep of fire. His cap soars and Rey wastes no time watching the junkboss’s head tumble to the sand, already turning to bolt for Niima’s gate as Constable Zuvio starts shouting for his militiamen. Another _shccchk_ and his familiar voice is cut short by a pained screech behind her.

 

The rest of the outpost has her very same idea—run, _run_. They all surge forward in panicked flocks, mothers with babes in arms and the oldest of tinkerers struggling towards the gates to Niima Outpost. They’re blocked, though. The stormtroopers move in solid lines, flanking the vendors by their stalls and forming a solid perimeter with blasters raised at the gate. Rey spins mid-stride and makes for another exit until something jerks at her navel and closes tight around her throat. The lead is back in her veins, rooting her to the spot as she's suspended. Her feet leave the sand.

 

The stormtrooper in chrome strides past her, shouting orders at the throngs of scavengers. Rey sees one stormtrooper roughly handle Old Traz to her knees, the old woman blinking in bafflement before the butt of the trooper’s rifle impacts. Blood spreads in her grey hair as she drops like a stone to the ground. 

 

Rey chokes on a scream of rage that can’t move past her tongue.

 

The thing in the mask finally moves into her field of vision, his stride easy and unhurried. He’s buckling the cylindrical device back to his belt, the device that forms fire into a living blade.

 

“Please,” she gasps past the phantom hand around her throat. She can’t see it but she knows it’s there, an intangible force that somehow is choking her until her vision spots. Finally it relents and the pressure disappears—Rey regains her footing and clutches at her throat, the bruises already hot under her fingers. “Why?” she manages, watching as the troopers start forming the people of the outpost into tightly contained groups.

 

“All that you need to know now is that you’re my _property_ ,” he enunciates carefully, as if she’s a slow-witted gizka, “I’ve killed your master. You have no power with which to barter with. You’re coming aboard that shuttle.” The man continues, managing to sound amused despite the voice modulator scrambling his tone to a monotonous drone. His head tilts, translating in her eyes as mute fascination with her frantic attempts to keep her feet firmly rooted in the sand of this planet. 

 

Rey reaches for her quarterstaff, the weapon coming down in a heavy swing towards his middle once she frees it from the strap on her shoulder.

 

The creature in the mask waves his hand and suddenly the ground is rushing towards her. A panicked thought crosses her mind before her face impacts with the dirt— _You don't understand—_ _I need to be here. What if they come back for me and I'm not **here**?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really couldn't stay away for long.
> 
> A note - this takes place roughly two/three-ish years before the events of The Force Awakens. It will be utilizing a few 'fan theories' that will show up in the plot.
> 
> This is not going to be a happy ride. It will deal with graphic subject matter and violence that I will do my best to trigger warn before the start of chapters that contain it. **No rape/implied rape/non-con will occur in this story.** That being said, a lot of bad shit will happen. Dark siders at their core are the worst kind of people in the Star Wars 'verse. You've been warned.
> 
> Just so we're all clear, Rey will be firmly in the realm of eighteen standard years of age when this story earns its explicit rating for sexual content.


	2. ACT I: The Abduction, Part II

**ACT I: The Abduction, Part II**

 

 **W** hen the sickly-sweet smell of bacta registers with her senses, Rey comes awake with a sudden start. Her thoughts are sluggish, stringent rays of light from overhead lamps filtering through her closed lids. She finally forces her eyes open with what feels like every iota of energy she has left.   

 

She’s strapped to some sort of rack, elevated at a precarious angle where she has to strain to keep from slipping against the tight durasteel of the restraints around her wrists and ankles. The room around her is stark, nothing but unfurnished paneling and slats of lighting. Her vision swims as she focuses on the looming shadow in the corner. The shadow takes form as it moves forward, solidifying into the tall, imposing lines of the man in the mask.

 

“Where am I?” she croaks, her voice scratchy. When she swallows, she can feel the bacta-patches strain from where they’ve been pasted around her throat. Rey feels the sweet, unfamiliar burn of the medicine leeching into her skin as it heals the bruising around her vocal cords. Whoever he is, he’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep her in one piece. Her nose should be at least sore from hitting the ground, but she can't feel anything amiss besides the bruising from the force that'd choked her into silence before the man robbed her of consciousness at Niima. 

 

She can count the times she’s had any sort of medical aide from such luxuries on one hand, and always at a great cost to barter for. For every fever and scrape she’s had, Rey has relied on her own knowledge of the healing properties that come from spindly plants that grow on Jakku—knowledge passed on by the kinder scrappers and Old Traz.

 

“Aboard a ship,” he answers, never breaking his line of sight on her as he slowly paces a trail in front of the rack. His posture is restless, his shoulders shifting under the heavy fabric of his robe. Rey tracks him with her eyes.

 

“I gathered that, but _where_ ,” she insists, a sense of vertigo setting in. Are they still in orbit around Jakku? Is it possible for her to get off this ship and back to the familiar wastes to keep waiting?

 

“Somewhere along the Guu Run,” he says, shattering her fragile hope in less than eight syllables. They’re already traveling along the only hyperlane that extends into the Western Reaches. Rey feels her lungs constrict and her vision spins. She slumps forward against her restraints, forcing herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. Rey has never been this far away from home in living memory.

 

“What about Niima?” She already knows the answer. She can smell ozonic reek of blaster fire clinging to both of them. Her eyes fix on that cylindrical hilt strapped to his belt. She wonders how many familiar faces were bathed by the firelight of the laser blade before it cut through them like it did Unkar Plutt's thick neck. 

 

“The outpost wasn’t spared,” he states. Rey’s head keeps spinning, her vision blurring at the corners as she fights back angry tears. She refuses to let this creature see her grieve. She clenches her mouth around any foolish noise threatening to spill out and hopes it lends her a contorted, fierce expression of defiance.

 

He remains impassive as she shouts and rails against her restraints, twice-damning him before he exits the room without another word to her. 

 

Only then does Rey collapse, her shoulders sagging under the weight of so many lives.

 

* * *

 

“I hope your shore leave was as productive as the debriefing from Phasma made it out to be,” Hux says to him over a flimsy. More logistical readouts concerning the restocking they’re no doubt due for after they make it to the Dromund system. The general is waiting by the detention block’s turbolifts, no doubt eager to hear more about this classified operation that he was kept largely in the dark over. Kylo Ren ignores him and motions to a lieutenant milling around the control consoles.

 

“Take the girl detained in cell two-four-seven to the medbay. Monitor her closely. Have the droids decontaminate her and run a standard checkup—make sure she’s not crawling with parasites,” he orders. The officer scurries down the corridor towards the girl’s cell, taking two sentry droids with him. The ruckus that ensues down the hall once they free the female from her restraints is tremendous. It holds Hux’s attention so thoroughly that the man forgets to continue badgering him. Kylo never knew one girl could make so much damn _noise_ , but here she was—destroying the peace and tranquility of the normally tomb-silent detention block on the _Finalizer_. 

 

“Spirited, that one,” notes Hux, his tone dry as he glances up from the flimsy to get a look at the girl down the corridor as she fights tooth and nail with the sentry droids. They manage to restrain her properly with cuffs before dragging her off behind the lieutenant, a few impressive curses in Huttese whose existence Kylo was previously unaware of reaching his ears.

 

“Spirited, but lacking the trait that the Supreme Leader was so certain she possessed.” Kylo flexes his fingers. She was Force-blind, as far as he could tell. The scant time in the cell probing her mind proved it. Some combat skills cultivated from a lifetime of living in that hellhole, but otherwise ungifted. In these moments he doubted the Supreme Leader’s foresight.

 

“Really? I’ve heard he’s never wrong about his hopefuls.” Hux purses his mouth into a thin, thoughtful line. Kylo has always respected at least one thing about Hux and that is his ability to limit his facial expressions to two presets—genuine disgust and a perfect scowl. Right now it’s the latter. 

 

“There’s a first time for everything, general.” Kylo will be damned if he gives Hux anything to run on. This _especially_ was none of his business.

 

Hux shrugs off the deflecting comment thrown his way, stowing away the flimsy on his person. “We’ll pace back through Hutt space and avoid the main hyperlanes. No need to draw more attention to ourselves. This operation has already drawn enough undue attention. I trust everyone in that settlement was exterminated to minimize a security breech?”

 

“Thoroughly. All that’s left of the place are the buildings and the rusting ships on its perimeters,” Ren replies.

 

“Then we’re to escort you and the girl as far as Dromund Kaas before returning to our oversector? I expected that we would at least remain in orbit while the selection process was underway, in case it goes unwell for your prospect and you’re forced to resume your normal duties.” Hux must've woken up wanting to try his patience today. 

 

Kylo flexes his fingers to form a tight fist once more. “It’s the business of the knights, not the military.”

 

“Aren’t they one in the same?” Hux drones, unamused.

 

Kylo Ren turns sharply on his heel towards the lifts, his answer to Hux almost lost in background hum of conversation floating between the detention block’s personnel. “Hardly.”

 

* * *

 

After Rey manages to kick the articulated limb off the FX-7 droid trying to shred her clothing off of her, its supervisory 2-1B surgical droid injects her with a mild sedative to slow her movements enough for new restraints to be clamped around her wrists. She’d been un-cuffed once she was turned over to the droids by the lieutenant and his sentry droids.

 

Big mistake on their part.

 

Rey finally lets the two droids crowd her onto an examination table once the sedative hits her bloodstream, the thought of stormtroopers having to oversee this process thoroughly unappealing. That fear pacifies whatever violence she held towards the droids when she first entered the medbay. She can deal with machines handling her—their touch is perfunctory and impersonal as the sedative sinks Rey into a numb, tranquil state.

 

So she lets the droid cut away her rags and shoes, the surgical tools whirring loudly as they slice through the tough Govath-wool of her boots. She's stripped to her skin as they run bioscanners over every inch of her body. As they peel the bacta-patches off of her throat, Rey wonders where her quarterstaff is. Confiscated or disposed of, probably. Her fingers itch for its comforting weight as the 2-1B spiders an instrument across her ribcage. 

 

“Growth slightly stunted by malnourishment in the past, but she shows strong vital signs. There should be no lasting effects if proper nutrition and supplements are introduced immediately,” says the 2-1B to itself, pressing a hypo to her arm. Rey jerks at the slight pressure of the hypo injecting into the surface of her skin. She can feel the individual needles as they worm in before something cool spreads. The coolness dissolves into a faint, pleasant burn.

 

The droids poke and prod her more. Rey focuses her eyes on the rounded, scope-like camera situated in the corner of the medbay. It’s been tracking her every movement as the droids tug her to the various stations and equipment spread around the medbay. She tries to suppress the idea that someone might be watching this procedure, humiliation already burning brightly in her chest.

 

“What’s that?” she asks warily when the surgical droid produces a tiny chip held delicately by forceps, her tongue leaden from the sedatives. Her speech comes out as a slow, slurred murmur once the droid takes the chip to her arm, making a neat incision in her skin with a scalpel. There must be a numbing agent in this drug they’ve given her—she can only feel a slight sting accompanying the deep cut and is mesmerized by the play of dark, rich blood threading down her bicep. The FX-7 wheels over with gauze to mop up the site once the B-1B slides the chip under the flap of skin, sealing the cut with bacta as it pinks into a neat scar. 

 

“Immunochip against most communicable disease—also contraceptive, good for a decade,” chirps the 2-1B. “Standard issue for the prospects.” 

 

“Prospects?” she prods the 2-1B with the question—it speaks actual Basic versus the Binary its FX-7 counterpart is spewing and appears to have a higher sense of self along with superiority. 

 

“Any further queries must be directed towards your superior,” cuts the 2-1B, its tone brooking no argument. By superior, she thinks it means the creature in the mask. 

 

They run a few more procedures until Rey is shivering in the recycled, cool air of the ship. They’ve yet to give her anything to wear save for a flimsy paper wrap to clutch around her body. Rey almost breaks down when the FX-7 extends its digits out to cut the ties of her hair. It falls to her shoulders in free-flowing waves. They run a strip of harsh light over every bit of skin from the neck down, striping the fine hairs on her body away to leave her as pink and raw as a newborn. 

 

Her fingers tremble when they strip the thin paper shroud away, urging her towards the far end of the medbay. The FX-7 preps a small metal stall with spouts overhead. Rey is herded into it to stand under a shocking torrent of hot water that is rife with stringent cleaning solutions. She watches it strip the oil embedded under her nails, the permanent stains of chemicals fading from her fingertips from years of scrubbing parts. It's a solid bet to wager that she hasn't been this clean since birth. 

 

By the end of the decon-shower, Rey feels scraped raw. The FX-7 helps dress her into dark clothing that’s been waiting on an examination table—a simple tunic and leg-wraps that are a muted black. The fabric and cut is the similar to what the masked man wears—even the belt and boots appear to be the same. Rey accepts it because she’s too proud to walk around naked in this hellhole.  

 

She catches her reflection in the glassy paneling of the decontamination chamber’s door. Staring back is a girl she doesn’t recognize. The droid has her hair braided into a tight queue that follows the line of her spine. The sight of her hair out of its normal knots is so downright alien that she feels a slight sense of nausea crawl up her throat.

 

_How are they supposed to recognize me like this?_

 

* * *

 

Rey is put in a square cell furnished only with a metal ledge and a toilet. She assumes the ledge is a bed. The sight of the barren surfaces makes her aches for the pallet of soft, threadbare fabrics and stuffed flightstuits that serve as her hammock in her bolthole. 

 

A clang near the door startles her, a slat opening in the wall as a covered tray is dropped into the cell. Rey reaches down, turning it over in her hands. She pops the lid and gapes at the sight of actual fresh greens and meat, a packet of vitamins tucked against a slice of _real bread_.

 

But she sets it down on the ledge, fearing drugs or worse that might be cooked into the meal. The smell of the sauce coating the thin cut of meat reaches her nose and her stomach rebels, reminding her that she’s been living on an insubstantial amount of calories for roughly a week. Rey sets herself in the corner of the cell, pressing her overheated forehead to the cool metal. 

 

The droids warned her of the slight fever that would accompany this round of immuno-boosters they’d put in her bloodstream.

 

“I didn’t go to all this trouble to do something as mundane as killing you by poisoning your dinner tray,” a voice says from the corridor outside. The door lets out a compressed _whoosh_ and opens on the man in the mask, his arms folded behind his back as he treads into the cell. The door closes behind him and the girl notices that the cell seems ten times smaller with him filling it. 

 

She presses her back into the corner, baring her teeth at him as she hisses out, “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

 

“Eat your meal and I will tell you,” he promises. Rey weighs her options—defy him and get nothing, fill her stomach and possibly get something out of him. She relents, grabbing up the tray and the utensils before wolfing down the contents. 

 

This goes on for two minutes. Silence stretches between them, broken only by the sound of her chewing as she devours every last scrap of food on her tray. It’s by far the best meal she can remember having in her life, fresh and free of the starchy preservatives she’s used to ingesting. The masked man watches every second of the process, tilting his head this way and that when she swipes up the juices left over by the meat with the piece of bread she’s left for last. 

 

Rey sops up every drop and stuffs the slice into her mouth, chewing slowly. This might be her last. When she swallows the vitamins in the packet and shoves the tray across the floor at him with a resounding clang, he speaks.

 

“You’re being put with the rest of a selection pool. Prospects sought by the Supreme Leader to join the ranks of his organization.” The lines feel forced and scripted coming from his mouth, but the implications raise the hairs on the back of her neck. 

 

“What happens to me?” Rey hates how small her voice sounds when she asks this question.

 

“You either succeed or fail. And from what I’ve seen, you’re veering towards failure. This is all you’ve earned for today.” The man has apparently decided that Rey has heard enough, pressing a hand to the access panel near the door. It opens for him.

 

Before the door closes on her view of him standing in the dark corridor, he turns to her. “A word of advice, scavenger—think only of yourself and you just might live.” 

 

* * *

 

Two days pass in a similar fashion, albeit free of the presence of the masked man who so far remains faceless and nameless to Rey. She sleeps very little—not because of the harsh, unforgiving surface of the ledge she calls her bed—but because of the unfamiliar hum of the ship accelerating around her. 

 

The third morning sees Rey pacing the small space restlessly. She’s eaten the meals that arrive every six hours because she won’t be weak from hunger in front of these people. When the door to the corridor finally slides open, she’s ready.

 

“Are you going to be difficult?” he asks her, flanked by a small escort of stormtroopers. His arms are crossed and he looks every bit the scolding parent instructing a surly child. Rey bites back the insult that she wants to let fly and clenches her fists.

 

“No,” she replies tersely. He steps back and motions for her to take the center of the formation. She complies and is led out of the warren of corridors to a set of lifts. The layout of the ship is familiar to Rey after so many years of rummaging around in the skeletons of star destroyers. There are some noticeable differences compared to the models she knows so well—this ship isn’t like any of the known variations of destroyers she’s studied on her glitchy terminal back home or the ones she knows by scavenging.

 

It’s _newer_. Sleeker lines, refined systems. Aspects of the older destroyers have been polished and fully realized in this one. She starts envisioning a way to the hanger. There’s an access panel near the lifts that she could duck into and follow towards a maintenance trench—a simple TIE fighter would be easy to fly and its hyperdrive rating is sufficient enough to get her back to the Western Reaches, if not back to Jakku itself. The only issues are the stormtroopers and _him_.

 

When the man in the mask turns to her as if she’s said something aloud, Rey gets the awful feeling that he _knows_ exactly what she’s thinking. She shutters her expression and pushes the thoughts from her head, focusing on the ceiling above as they crowd into the lift. He turns back to the closing lift doors and within seconds they’re exiting into a large hanger bay towards the _Upsilon_ -class shuttle that caught her interest on Niima. 

 

Rey has never seen so many people in her life. The stormtroopers and uniformed officers scurry like flocks of gnaw-jaws from lifts to corridors that branch off of the hanger, sparing Rey’s group only cursory glances as they wade through the chaos towards the docking ramp of the shuttle. A stack of TIE fighters and interceptors rest on repulsor cradles lining one side of the bay. Beyond the forcefield of the hanger Rey can spot the green, hazy curve of an unfamiliar planet.

 

* * *

 

“The _Finalizer_ is away, sir,” one of the stormtroopers mutters to the man in the mask once the shuttle judders to a sudden halt. Rey glances up from the bench she’s been confined to.

 

“Where’s the destroyer going?” she asks the masked man, following him towards the docking ramp once she’s bidden to rise by the crook of his finger. The ramp starts to yawn open. She has to struggle to keep up with the man’s long-legged strides and nearly falls on her face in surprise once she nears the end of the ramp. 

 

Rey has never seen anything so green in her life. The shuttle doors have opened on something she’s only heard off-worlders talk about—a jungle. Trees. Green, lush vines that hang like support cables from thick branches. 

 

“Elsewhere,” he finally replies, cryptic as ever. She’s prodded out of the shuttle by the butt of a blaster rifle. The stormtroopers are cued behind her. Rey nearly lets out a noise of surprise when the soles of her boots sink into the soft, loamy turf of the jungle floor. They’re in a clearing facing a path lined with lumpy, uneven stones. It’s a rough path overgrown with weeds that the man in the mask is bent on reaching.

 

The lilting, foreign sound of water hitting a metal surface startles her. She looks up at the dark thunderclouds, surprised at the slight haze of something _falling_ from them. On Jakku, storms are dry. Only lightning and winds accompany the storm season. 

 

“Are you unfamiliar with rain?” he asks her, managing to sound scathingly sarcastic through the voice modulator. He’s stopped midway between the shuttle and the stone path, turning to watch her through the visor of the mask. The stormtroopers aren’t following them. They stay near the shuttle and perform post-flight checks, ignoring the girl and the man near the fringe of the jungle. Rey somehow can feel the slight sense of discomfort radiating off all of them when they shoot glances at the gloom of the jungle beyond the clearing.

 

Rey reaches out, cupping her hands to let the rain pool in her hands as it starts falling in earnest. She lets her silence speak for her as she sifts the water through her fingers, the soft patter of drops hitting the leather of her boots.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Dromund Kaas](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dromund_Kaas) is a swampy, wet planet located in a series of systems known as the Sith Worlds in the Outer Rim. It was the center of the reconstituted Sith Empire during the time of the Cold War, who establised it as their capital in 4980 BBY until the empire's eventual demise.   
>  I hope everyone familiar with this fucking planet is screaming at Rey to get back on the shuttle. As always, thank you to the readers who continue to read on! The feedback is always welcome.


	3. ACT I: The Abduction, Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Beware of gore and graphic depictions of death in this chapter.**

**ACT I: The Abduction, Part III**

 

 **T** hick weeds choke the pathway. Some furl out thorny leaves to snag on Rey’s leg wraps as they pass. The stormtroopers stay with the shuttle, leaving her and the masked man to make their own way towards whatever his target destination is.

 

She is still unaware of their purpose here on this wet, muggy planet. The threat of creatures sounding quite larger than the two of them call far off in the jungle. It makes the hairs on the back of her neck raise up, but the man seems unperturbed by the hiss and roar of something distinctly reptilian thirty meters to their left. Rey speeds up, finding sense in sticking close to the only person with something resembling a weapon in this hostile place.

 

The shock of being on a different world has worn off entirely. Even the pervasive pattering of rain on her neck has lost some of its novelty since her clothes now sag with the weight of water. The rain coming from the sky has gone from a downpour to a light drizzle. Rey fights against the discomfort and continues to try and keep up with the man's loping, long strides. She can barely make out a path at this point. The flagstones have given way to a grassy trail too overgrown to distinguish from the rest of the jungle. If she wanders off or loses him, she doubts she’ll make it out of here. 

 

A very solid sense of some _wrongness_ has invaded Rey’s mind, as if a pall hangs over this place. She isn’t sure if it’s simply her nerves or something deeper agitating what she knows are her gut instincts, but rarely has she been lead wrong by heeding the warning signs. Something wrong lives here.

 

Something old, something dark, something evil—

 

Rey has to catch herself after a gnarled root unexpectedly snags on the tip of her boot. She is thrown to the jungle floor, barely saving herself from a faceful of mud by letting the impact land on her raised forearms instead. The masked man turns slowly on her and witnesses her fall before it happens—all the while tilting his head.

 

To his credit, he doesn’t say a word and goes right back to ignoring her, turning back to continue his single-minded approach to making his way through this jungle. He has to take out the burning blade ever so often, hacking at a sapling in his way or a tall stand of weeds. They are incinerated by the heat before the blade even makes contact with their long stalks. Rey walks over everything he cuts down, the smell of burning vegetation thick in her nose.

 

Finally, the sun reaches its zenith—though she can hardly tell due to the thick cloud cover. The only indication is the burning outline of it through the wispy tails of one thunderhead before the clouds purl like smoke, darkening from grey to black as they take on a thicker form. The rain begins anew, a faint drizzle turning into fat drops that splatter against the crown of her head. 

 

“How much longer?” she finally asks, slogging through a thick patch of vegetation and mud. The trail has converged with another. It shows signs of recent use versus the abandoned, overgrown path they’ve spent the last couple of hours traveling. The man takes out his comlink to check something. Coordinates? He adjusts his stride to take them more westward. 

 

“Not too long. It'd be quicker if we landed closer, but the stormtroopers don’t come near the temple,” he grunts out. The fabric shrouding his upper half must be made of a wicking fabric. Water trickles down the ragged edges of the dark cloth. He doesn’t look the least bit worse for wear. Rey, contrarily, feels like a sodden rag.

 

“Don’t or _won’t_?” she bites out, tugging her booted foot free of the sucking mud.

 

“A mix, admittedly. This planet is almost poisonous to certain minds. The weaker minds, especially,” he explains, his gaze shifting to look up at the canopy overhead. Rey feels a twist in her gut. 

 

She doesn’t ask anymore questions. Rey has memorized the path back to the shuttle by familiar landmarks—a strange rock formation, a bend in the path, a dead tree. She commits them to memory. A _Theta_ -class shuttle is easy enough to pilot, and from the look she got at the _Upsilon-_ class’s controls, they differ only slightly. The stormtroopers will pose a problem, though. And she has no idea how long they intend to remain on this strange planet. 

 

Or how long _he_ intends to keep her here.

 

Finally, the jagged outline of something tall jutting through the canopy beyond makes its way into her line of sight. A spire of some kind, overgrown with vines that look almost organically threaded through the access panels and circuitry. The tip of it pierces the mist overhead—Rey can see veins of lightning crackle towards the metal tip. More signs of a dead civilization appear further off. An entire city lays crumbling just over the dip in the slight hill, rising from the jungle. 

 

The man steers her away from that, heading further into the interior. They follow the cut of a stream in the underbrush until it thickens into a small river. It’s only a few more minutes of following its path until the river spills over the edge of a great precipice, a jungle basin resting below the outcropping of rock Rey recognizes as a cliff. They’re standing atop it, overlooking the land below. The view is frighteningly unobstructed from here. Lightning spires poke out of the jungle canopy, all of them slightly listing to the side as the boggy undergrowth attempts to swallow them whole. To the north is the crumbling city, blocks of buildings sinking into a pronounced chasm that looks like it's cut into the very bedrock of the planet. 

 

“What is this place?” she asks, mystified by the sight. Decay is something familiar to her, even on this grand scale. But the amount of vegetation is staggering. Instead of the sand she is used to seeing consume skeletons of starships, it is the jungle that is eating at the metal of this deserted place.

 

“A capital of a dead empire. Long deserted.” He seems disinterested in the far-off city, intent on finding something near the edge of the cliff. He stops, tilts his body over the ledge, and then finally steps off into the void.

 

Rey doesn’t even have time to let out a gasp of surprise before something is pulling her towards the edge. She screams, digging her feet into the loamy turf before that strange, fishhook feeling around her navel pulls her over the edge and vertically down the cliff. She lands directly on her ass with a soft _whump_ on a grassy ledge not but four meters below.

 

She’s trying to shake off the sense of vertigo and a stinging pain in her tailbone when his legs block out her vision. 

 

“The next time, could you _warn me_ before you pull me to what I think is certain death?” Rey wheezes, the wind knocked from her lungs. She tries to gather it back with short, precise inhales.

 

“Would you have gone along with it if I’d warned you?” he drawls, amusement coloring the monotone voice that comes out of the mask.

 

“No, but I would’ve found a way to climb down versus being pulled around like a heap of slag by some mystical power,” she bites out, finally getting her feet under her. The ledge is solid and wide—if she’d stepped closer to the edge of the cliff above it would’ve been in plain sight. Further off the edge of this surface is the real drop—a dizzying fifty meter plunge to the small pool the waterfall forms in the basin below. 

 

The masked man isn’t focused on the drop. He’s making his way along the narrow shelf of earth towards a dip in the cliff face.

 

The dip turns out to be an old entryway of some kind hidden between pillars of rock and scrubby weeds. Sunken into the cliffside, the heavy blast doors sit between two automated turrets that turn towards them on their approach. Rey flinches, but the man in the mask walks on, utterly unperturbed. Despite the threat of being shredded by blaster bolts, the turrets fail to fire on them and simply collapse back into their casings beneath the durasteel paneling lining the door’s threshold. The man puts his hand on a panel—possibly a biometrics panel, if Rey's any judge of it. 

 

A grid lights up his mask, scanning the surface while the panel maps out his hand. It seems satisfied by the input. The blast doors slide open with a well-hinged ease that makes Rey believe they’re not the first ones here.

 

Before them lays a bleak sight. A long, dimly lit corridor that vaguely resembles the halls of a star destroyer stretches before her. The masked man motions her forward. 

 

* * *

 

After another maze of empty corridors that are distinctly _not_ decrepit, he puts Rey in a featureless, square room with only enough space to fully extend her arms both ways. Vents line the ceiling alongside a solitary disc of light that flickers intermittently, as if power is being drawn elsewhere to cause surges through the electrical system.

 

The sound of the masked man’s footsteps fade down the hall before a scuffling sound from above startles her.

 

“Hello?” calls a voice from the ceiling vent. It’s a girl’s voice, high and sweet. Rey thinks she’s imagining it before the voice comes again.

 

“Hello...” the other girl’s voice trails off now, uncertainty coloring it.

 

“I’m here!” Rey shouts back, relief flooding through her. She’s not the only one around here.

 

“I thought I was imaging the noise when they brought you in,” the girl tells her through the vent. Rey can make out a shape through the slats, but nothing definitive. The ceiling above is a good two meters distance. She could try spreading her legs and walking herself up the walls to the vent, but it’s only large enough to fit her arm through. The door looks equally unmanageable. She’s certain if she gets too turned around in this cell she won’t know _where_ the door is. It blends seamlessly into the wall.

 

“Call me overly dramatic, but I sure am glad to see you,” the girl overhead cuts off Rey’s train of thought with her admission. Rey tries to smile up at the vent.

 

“What’s your name?” she calls up. So far the sound of their voices haven’t brought anyone running. Yet.

 

Another voice reaches her ears from the vents, coming from the left of the girl’s room above.

 

“Some of us can’t let others get some karking sleep,” it growls, distinctly male. Rey grits her teeth.

 

“I’m Rey,” she says as softly as she can manage, her voice traveling up the metal walls. 

 

“Fay’et,” the girl replies, “and try your best to ignore Thrash. He’s a plain brute from Dathomir and doesn’t have a shred of common sense _or_ manners.”

 

“Is he in there with you?”

 

“No, thank the stars. He’s in the room next door. There’s a Sullustan opposite me and a very chatty Echani boy in the other cell next to me. But there probably are more.” 

 

“How long have you been here?” Rey sets her fingertips against the wall in front of her, feeling along the seams of the door.

 

“A week, by my count. You must be in the holding cells they brought us to before sorting—I’m up in a room with a bunk and toilet. Not much else. They do feed us, though,” Fay’et stops at that, the sound of rummaging reaching Rey’s ears before a packet is slipped through the slats in the vent. Rey catches it—a simple protein bar, but plenty enough food for her.

 

“Thank you,” she manages to croak out, an overwhelming sense of fear closing her throat. The walls seem to close in on her. Rey presses her back to the wall, sliding down until she’s folded up on the floor.

 

“Try and get some sleep. They’re planning to take us to the trial grounds soon,” Fay’et’s voice fades, shuffling overhead as Rey hears the familiar sounds of a body hitting a soft, blanket-lined surface.

 

Rey stashes the bar in the folds of her tunic. Only after a long while of staring at the featureless wall opposite does her mind slip into sleep, her chin dropping to her chest.

 

* * *

 

When Rey wakes, she’s left with the disorienting sense that she’s no longer in her cell. The smell of decaying plants and musty air filters into her lungs. Her arm stings, as if a needle has recently lanced through the skin.

 

“Wake up, Rey,” whispers a familiar voice—Fay’et. Someone is shaking her fiercely. Rey manages to crack her eyes open. A twi’lek girl, Rutian by the color of her skin paired with olive-shaped eyes, is obscuring her vision in a dark chamber with low ceilings. Everything is comprised of crumbling stone.

 

“The droids sedated us. They put us in here—I’m not sure where, but the rest will wake up and they won’t be as _fair_  about this competition as I am,” the twi’lek hurries out in a low voice. Rey tries to will the fog out of her limbs, standing with more than a little assistance from Fay’et.

 

There’s at least twenty other bodies surrounding them. Most are still out cold. The others are stirring to some level of consciousness. They vary in age, race, and gender. All of them are dressed in the plain black clothing Rey wears, bare of weaponry and other supplies. 

 

“C’mon,” Fay’et urges her. A narrow archway is the only exit visible, leading down more labyrinthine corridors that make little sense. The architecture has changed from the clean, industrial lines of the holding cell to sagging ceilings of stone and tight, claustrophobic corridors of slate. 

 

Rey’s boots crunch over something.

 

It catches her off-guard when she looks down and finds the bones of some humanoid creature laying beneath her soles.

 

“Don’t look down,” Fay’et warns, already a few meters ahead. Rey speeds her pace, keeping her chin level. She’s used to dead and decaying bodies. Rey tries to blame her panic and unease on the jarring sense of how _new_ this entire situation is.

 

They spend an hour trying to find somewhere suitable to hide and set up some form of camp. One sortie into a dank hall leaves the both of them gagging over the rotting corpse of a long dead hopeful, their clothing matching hers and Fa'yet's to a tee...albeit decaying. 

 

Above the decaying corpse is something scratched into the limestone of the wall. Its nails must’ve been strong enough to at least chalk lines in the soft stone, because the message it was trying to convey is clearly legible.

  

 

“Cheerful,” Rey deadpans.

 

“But what does it _mean_?” Fay’et puzzles, tracing a finger over the curve of the letter wesk. She taps on the aurek contemplatively. “Why would they warn us about the dead, of all things?”

 

“It beats me,” Rey admits, glancing around the corridor. “I’m more concerned about the living. Especially our competition.”

 

“They’re easier to deal with than what might live in here. This is a _Sith_ tomb. There’s no telling what’s been put in here to guard the sarcophagi and artifacts,” Fay’et says on standing, distancing herself from the mouldering bones—still thick with greying meat—of the corpse. It looks like a humanoid female—small. She can’t have been more than a girl.

 

“How do you know so much about Sith tombs?” Rey asks her once they’ve exited onto the crumbling perimeter of a mezzanine. It runs the length of a great, vast hall interspersed with crumbling holes in the ceiling. A massive statue of a faceless man bent in supplication leans drunkenly on the mezzanine opposite of theirs. 

 

“A fair bit of dealing in the illegal archeology market. You wouldn’t believe how much Ludo Kressh’s _pedicure set_ of all things sold for on the Hutt market to a well-endowed collector.” Fay’et shoots Rey a sly, small smile over her shoulder, picking her way lightly over crumbling stones.

 

They keep to the wall, fearing that venturing further out on the ledge will lead to some stones coming loose from whatever is gluing them together.

 

“So what’re the guidelines for this competition?” Rey asks, feeling thoroughly out of her element. She tosses a makeshift tether of the ropey, thick vine that grows out of the walls to Fay’et. They cling to it like a railing as they make their way to the end of the mezzanine, intent on exploring the rooms that might lead off of it. They need someplace obscure and decidedly monster-free if they’re going to make it to the end of the week. 

 

“There aren’t any rules in here except _survive_ to the end of the seven day period. And you look like you know something about that. We can be allies. Then the both of us make it out of here,” Fay’et tells her, her eyes glued to the stones beneath their boots.

 

“And do what? What do they want to do with the survivors of this...test?” Rey asks, her speech halting. She isn’t sure what all of this is about. Her question makes Fay’et stop. The twi’lek turns to look at her with a curious expression.

 

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asks, her blue fingers clenching on the vine they both hold. At Rey’s blank expression she adds, “Well, aren’t you...y’know, _gifted_?”

 

“No —I’m no one. A scavenger,” Rey manages, forcing her feet to find the next step.

 

“That’s impossible. The rest of us have some ability—it’s the only common thing we could figure existed between all of us,” Fay'et insists, confusion swamping her expression.

 

“What ability? Wait, Fay’et,” Rey cautions, all too familiar with untrustworthy looking platforms after a lifetime of edging around on them. But her warning comes too late—Fay’et steps, opening her mouth. She must be asking what Rey is on about, but the stones slip beneath her. Beneath both of them. 

 

Rey plunges, saved only by the stretch of vine between them. Fay’et manages to get a leg up on the more solid stones anchored into the wall itself, scrambling to keep her grip on the vine between them. It strains but holds true as the twi’lek struggles to get to her feet, slinking her belly to the stones as she suspends Rey by holding her half of the vine.

 

Rey hears the crumbling stones hit the floor far below. It’s a black chasm staring back at her everytime she looks down, so she forces herself to look upward at Fay’et and try to work the problem. This isn’t the first situation of this nature she’s dealt with.

 

“You’re too heavy,” the twi’lek grits out, straining to keep the vine from slipping in her grip. For one breathless moment, Rey thinks the girl will save herself and let her drop. But the twi’lek moves her hand and something _shoves_ Rey to the wall, letting her grasp onto the crumbling vines sprouting from the surface until she finds one with some anchorage to it. Rey clings to it, trying to duck closer to the ledge as the rain of debris and masonry cuts into her back.

 

Fay’et screams fill Rey’s ears after one larger piece hits the overhang she’s resting on, dislodging the crumbling rock where the twi’lek is laying. Rey reaches out, catching her by the arm to halt her free fall. The shock jolts the vine Rey is clinging to. She can feel it slip from the mooring rocks it grows out from far above, fraying where the jagged edge of the stone cut into it.

 

“Please don’t let go,” Fay’et is begging her, the sound of her voice overwhelmingly small in the chamber. Rey’s world narrows down to the slip of their palms as sweat coats the skin, loosening her grip. 

 

“I'm losing you,” Rey chokes out, tears and sweat alike beading on her cheeks. She tries to will something in her to pull the girl _up_ , but the call goes unanswered. Her grip fails and the twi’lek plummets into the dark, screaming. It’s a long fall, punctuated by the thick _crcakh_ of a body hitting the stones.

 

Rey tries to focus on scrambling up the fraying vine, finally reaching what’s left of the overhang above after a few minutes of struggling.

 

“Fay’et,” Rey tries to call her as quietly as she can manage, mindful of the warning about the beasts that live in this tomb. Light leaks from a hole in the ceiling above to let a slant of it illuminate the floor far below.

 

Fay’et isn’t recognizable anymore. She’s spread face up on the flagstones with a pool of blood widening its margins beneath her body. The sight reminds Rey of her ragdoll, limbs askew at impossible angles. She must’ve hit something on the way down, because her face is split vertically in half, both halves sagging to the floor. A wet, pulsing gash has replaced her clever smile. Arterial spray wets the stone.

 

Rey covers her mouth to choke back a yelp of shock.

 

* * *

 

The playback feed of the twi’lek’s face splitting on the masonry jutting from the wall is rewound for a third time before the other man standing in front of the vidscreen lets it play out again. Kylo has set his helm aside and has chugged his fifth canteen of water. 

 

Comfort was in mind when the droids constructed the control room at the Dromund Kaas compound. A long couch is set against the wall behind them beside a refrigerator unit built into the wall. Banks of computers flicker on and off as the power fights to keep running. There’s probably a vine growing through a power cell. He’ll have to take a look at the relay later.

 

Dominating one of the walls is a massive vidscreen. A good fifteen working camera feeds that are situated within the temple stack vertically and horizontally along the screen. The robed, elderly man beside Kylo flicks his finger along the screen that has the camera in the antechamber Rey and her ill-fated ally are in. The gesture clears the playback from the screen and shows them the current view. 

 

Rey is huddled on her side. Kylo can see her shoulders shaking from here. He admires the fact that she isn’t making enough noise for the audio feed to receive the sound. 

 

“Well, there goes the first. And we’re not even two hours in,” grumbles Inquisitor Tremayne, formerly of the old Imperial Intelligence. Now he serves as sort of a liaison between the knights and Snoke’s incarnation of the old Imperial agency, the security bureau. Kylo has known him for as long as he’s been with the First Order and finds him a decent enough peer, considering his grandfather was so invested in his abilities while he was still living.

 

Tremayne coordinates these selection pools every five years. The knights merely bring him the prospects they acquire through their searches or by the direction of the Supreme Leader.

 

“She had enough warning from the scavenger. Her own poor reflexes got her killed.” Kylo tips the canteen back, his throat working to swallow the swig of water.

 

“And saved _your_ prospect, I might add. Has she shown any sign of Force sensitivity?” The inquisitor frantically beats out a command on his keyboard.

 

“No,” Kylo admits, setting his water bottle aside. 

 

“The Supreme Leader sends a Force-blind girl into the most haunted—” the inquisitor manages to get out before the door to the hall hisses open on two figures.

 

“No need to stand, everyone keep your seats. I’ve arrived,” announces a female voice from the doorway, laden with sarcasm. Two more knights from his order join them at the vidscreen, both touching a salute to their chest. One is overwhelmingly large, bulky even beneath the neuranium plating and dark robes. The other is slimmer beneath the thick armoring and fabric but only a few hairs shorter than her companion. 

 

“I forgot you two were joining us this cycle,” grits out the inquisitor. He looks none too pleased to see the pair, considering the history between the three of them. 

 

“Hello to you as well, Antinnis. I barely recognized you—new implants?” Sariss is the first to disengage the clasps on her mask, lifting it away from her head to set it on a nearby table beside Kylo's. The metal legs nearly buckle under the weight of both helms. She’s cropped off all her hair since Kylo has last seen her, but her face still has that brittle cast of nearly plastoid-like proportions. He can’t tell if her artificial youth is the result of careful alchemy or stims at this point. 

 

“I’ve had these since last year,” says Tremayne, the flesh around the cybernetics covering half of his face twitching with annoyance.

 

“And I’ve not seen you in _two_ years—at least,” Sariss reminds him, pausing to duck her head in a deferential nod to Kylo. She makes her way over to the refrigerator unit to withdraw two bottles of filtered water, tossing one to Yun. He catches it and cracks open the top. 

 

“That’s highly irregular for you to forget us coming, Tremayne,” Yun is eager to add in, pulling his mask free from his face. He drops his helm next to where Sariss put hers on the table alongside Kylo's. The legs give way and the tabletop sinks slowly under the weight of the helms, the metal of the legs bending like wet paper. 

 

Everyone ignores it. 

 

“Is it really that irregular of me to forget annoyances?” mutters Tremayne to the vidscreen. 

 

Sariss arches her eyebrows so high that they’re in serious danger of disappearing into her hairline. “Highly. I thought I’d made it clear we’d be observing this selection pool in person. This is the closest I get to watching _sports_.”

 

“If this is a _sport_ to you, Sariss, you seem to be hellbent on winning. The Nightbrother you sent along had to be severely sedated in order to prevent him from injuring himself with the way he kept raging around his cell at all hours,” spits out Tremayne, a vein already popping out on his forehead. 

 

Kylo ignores the chaotic exchange going on behind him, taking another pull from his water bottle as he watches Rey scramble to put her back against something solid.

 

“I’ve an eye for talent, Antinnis. And the Nightbrother is pure talent. Meanwhile, Yun sent the twi’lek—some spice dealer from Nar Shaddaa that he found in a pazaak den. Very strong instincts—using them to hustle the tables and persuade prospective buyers. She might last more than a week—”

 

“She’s already dead,” Kylo cuts her off.

 

“—she didn’t last more than a _day_ ,” Sariss crows at Yun, offering up her palm to her companion. He doles out a few larger denomination credit chits, radiating annoyance. 

 

“More to the point, the others haven’t woken up yet. Only Lord Ren’s prospect has managed to survive the temple’s interior thus far,” Tremayne mumbles over his keyboard, switching one feed to the sea of bodies prone on the floor of the entry chamber. Most of them are still struggling to metabolize the sedatives in their systems. All of them are implanted with a tracking chip that monitors their vital signs. Their heart rates and other such biometrics read out on a separate terminal. So far, twenty-one remain alive. Two have died from the sedative since their last check-in. The twi’lek expired from severe trauma.

 

“And it will be a bloodbath in that chamber once the rest of them awaken. Half of them will probably die before they wake up if a certain few manage to struggle to some form of consciousness. I’ve read their dossiers. This year’s _tryouts_ are going to prove to be very brutal. I hope we’re recording this and the feeds don’t bug out like last time,” Yun mutters, moving closer to the screen. He joins Kylo on his side of the vidscreen, tipping his head back to chug the entire contents of the bottle.  

 

“They malfunction ever so often because the feeds are randomly rearranged or destroyed by the whim of whatever lives in that tomb. I’ve heard one technician went quite mad after something crawled into view on one of the feeds. Strange places, Sith tombs,” wonders Sariss aloud, finding a seat on the couch behind them. She props her booted feet up on the arm, leaning her blaster rifle against it. 

 

“Everyone be quiet. The terentatek’s approaching. Probably smelled the blood or heard the noise,” mutters Tremayne. All four of them focus on the vidscreen.

 

* * *

 

Rey has to cover her mouth to keep from whimpering when the terrible _pop_ of the girl’s shoulder tearing from its socket echoes in the chamber. Soon the sound of flesh ripping follows, the slow _plink_ of so many drops of blood wetting the flagstones.

 

Huddling against the overhang above the gruesome scene below, Rey is witness to every detail and can’t bring herself to look away.

 

Something is _eating_. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The aurebesh in this chapter reads 'BEWARE THE DEAD' in bold script.
> 
> As is par for course in my fics, there are very few OCs in this chapter. Only Fay'et and Thrash are mine. The rest are characters from the EU and are listed below.
> 
> [Sariss](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sariss) \- Sariss is back with a vengeance from the EU - she's in her mid to late fifties in Ja'ak. Her and Yun have survived their EU fates to become Knights of Ren in my storyline. Those who are unfamiliar with the Prophetess and her apprentice might want to go read her and Yun's wikipages to get familiar with their backstories. [Who I see when I imagine Sariss in Ja'ak.](http://avenrue.tumblr.com/post/138443870123/womeninfilmsmoking-killing-isnt-like-smoking)
> 
> [Yun](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Yun) \- I imagine him a bit bigger in this incarnation, but his backstory remains the same. He's in his mid to late forties in Ja'ak. [Who I see when I imagine Yun in Ja'ak.](http://avenrue.tumblr.com/post/138443936863)
> 
> [Inquisitor Tremayne](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Antinnis_Tremayne) is a character from the EU and best known for being one of Vader's apprentices. Formerly a Jedi in training, he served as High Inquisitor in Palpatine's empire, thus he finds himself in a similar role in the First Order as a member of their intelligence bureau.
> 
> [There's an 8track for Ja'ak like Forms.](http://8tracks.com/calyxofawildflower/ja-ak) Big props to [caylxofawildflower](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperthroughthewall/pseuds/calyxofawildflower) once more being a wonderful muse by nailing every single emotion that will come into this fic in song form. 
> 
> [Ja'ak has its own tag on my tumblr. Feel free to follow along!](http://avenrue.tumblr.com/tagged/Ja'ak)


	4. ACT I: The Abduction, Part IV

**ACT I: The Abduction, Part IV**

 

 **M** ailocs, as she recalls from browsing a glitchy encyclopedia on her old terminal back on Jakku, are known to be highly excitable when woken. They are mainly airborne save for when they roost, possessing no limbs to speak of besides a long, prehensile tail that they curl around vines or stalactites in their caves. At the end of this tail is a two-pronged stinger that has the ability to puncture most armor and shields. 

 

Therefore it’s prudent for Rey—woefully unarmored—to remain absolutely still while she formulates a plan to cross this particular chasm in the vaults she’s stumbled upon.

 

It’s the second day of the trial. The crypts are now busy with the screams and shouting of so many people fighting against the elements as well as each other. Rey keeps forging her way deeper into the temple, unwilling to stay near the populated areas that lay close to the room where they all started.

 

Rey picks up her feet, moving along the edge of the chasm. She keeps one hand on the wall, guiding her fingers along the cracks until she meets another wall. She follows the surface of it, trusting her other senses in lieu of sight. Some chambers are well-lit with crumbling ceilings while others are as pitch black as, well, a tomb. Rey has spotted more than one of the sarcophagi Fay’et was talking about yesterday and when she does, she rapidly backpedals out of the rooms she finds them in.

 

She’s scavenged some supplies from the various caches and corpses not near any Sith remains—rope, ration packs, a rusted canteen, and a strong length of metal that must’ve once been a spear’s haft. It reminds her of her old quarterstaff. The last two days have been decidedly some of the worst of her life, but she keeps herself positive with the promise of surviving to the end of this seven day cycle.

 

So Rey feeds herself sparingly from the ration packs and sleeps only in short, furtive bursts—always wedged high on some ledge that is far out of sight and reach from whatever prowls these floors. She almost broke her neck attempting to claw her way up to the broken ceiling in a blind panic yesterday, after that _thing_ had lumbered off and left only a leg of Fay’et’s corpse for later. Her friend—because she was a friend, brief as their friendship was—is reduced to offal and a grease stain on the floor of the principle chamber. 

 

Rey abandoned her climb after slipping a third time that day, trying to reach toward the light glinting overhead. She sunk back down into the dark of the tomb, consigned to wait out the night and formulate her next step.

 

The last few hours have been going well. She’s only run into the mailocs this deep in the tombs, but has had to avoid passing patrols of roving prospects that have formed tight pacts. They gang up on one another in small skirmishes, but where one group falls, the winners splinter into smaller factions until only one or two are left eyeing one another.

 

Rey saw such a duel from a vine-choked overhang this morning. Thrash, who she knows by Fay’et warning of his status as a male Dathomirian, has been largely absent from the remaining prospects. 

 

It turns her stomach, what one person is willing to do to the other they once called ally. She wonders if Fay’et would have been reduced to fighting her in such a way if it boiled down to it. Rey tries not to think of Fay’et. She’s dead and long gone—tomb fodder. Just like she will be if she doesn’t keep moving.

 

The girl finally finds her footing after skimming along a ledge as wide as the span of her toes, groping blindly until she feels out a groove in the wall, tracing over lettering that covers an old magnetic lock that holds a door fast. Her fingers try dialing a few numbers in, the panel illuminating the space around the door only faintly. It’s enough light for Rey to work out another combination. Miraculously, the door springs free with a long suffering groan—Rey checks the flock roosting overhead. Still out like a light. 

 

Rey steps into the newly opened chamber beyond. It’s another hallway—big surprise, that—which has more of a curve to it than the others. It slopes down into a stairwell that winds tightly towards a lower level. Rey wonders if going further down would be a wise idea, considering she’s yet to come across the creature that butchered Fay’et’s body. 

 

But the alternative is walking back across the chasm and back towards the fighting. So Rey gathers up the frayed ends of her courage and starts stepping down into the dark void below the visible steps, her breathing ridiculously loud-sounding in the silence of the crypt.

 

“The twi’lek’s pet human,” interrupts a voice from the darkness, the sound like gravel on sheet metal. Rey can see a pair of burning eyes focus on her as something, _someone_ advances up the steps below her. Out of the shadows steps a Zabrak male that stands at least two heads higher than her. Every visible inch of him is covered in thick, jagged markings over bruise-yellow skin; in his hand is some sort of electrostaff that looks salvaged from a sentry droid.

 

Thrash.

 

Rey unfastens the bundle of rope from her belt, dropping everything on her save her staff. She doesn’t need the added weight for what’s coming. What she _knows_ is coming by the predatory narrowing of his eyes and the growing tenseness along his broad, slab-like shoulders.

 

She lifts her foot, her heel catching on the step behind her as she carefully guides her staff to guard her front. 

 

“The Echani brat gave me some trouble with a stick just like that. Not for long—didn’t know they sent them in here that young. Tender neck for breaking, though—just like yours.” Thrash is all force. She’s seen people like him in Niima—bounty hunters, bruisers, enforcers. They all have a weakness to exploit. Rey starts working out the steps in her head, her muscles flooding with the familiar burn of adrenaline. She’ll need every last bit of it if she wants to live to see the next morning—this she knows in her very bones. 

 

Rey leads him up to the flatter ground of the ramp above the stairs. A strategy is quickly solidifying in her mind, but it entails a lot of goading and leading.

 

“C’mere, runt—let’s rearrange that face like you did to your friend,” Thrash taunts, trying to coax her into striking first with an artless spin of the electrostaff he holds. A thought occurs— _how did he know about Fay'et?_ Rey grits her teeth, feeling her feet pick out another pattern as they circle one another. She can’t let him have her back. The air behind her head moves and suddenly he’s behind her—how _quick—_

 

Rey turns, catching the haft of the electrified staff as it connects with her jaw. The world spins. 

 

* * *

 

 Kylo watches their exchange from a cramped chair in the control room. Tremayne and Yun retired to their rooms hours ago. Scattered plates hover over his head as Sariss sorts out the mess the four of them have made in the room. With a flick of her fingers, she stacks the majority of dirty plates into the arms of a waiting serving droid standing just outside the door and piles emptied canisters and wrappers into a waste bin under a computer bank.

 

“Confine the three of you to a room and you all turn into Gamorreans,” she mutters under her breath, surveying her work as the control room once more seems clear of trash. The noise of fighting finally reaches her and Sariss spins on her heel, tugging her chair closer with the Force as she pulls it up towards the screen beside Kylo.

 

“Who is it this time?” she asks, popping the tab on a can of some liquid energy supplement. He’s been awake for forty-eight hours straight. Sariss has probably been awake for twice that time, considering she and Yun landed a solid day’s journey away from the compound before the trials started. 

 

“My desert find and your Dathomirian brute,” he provides, flicking his finger on the screen to narrow the view on the pair that’s fighting in the hallway. She was far too close to the sublevels for his comfort, but now Kylo feels a twisting sensation in his gut. This might be the end for his scavenger.  

 

“It’s your prospect and mine— _f_ _inally_. He’s killed at least five others and sustained only minor injuries. I hate to say it, but this looks like the end of your girl, Kylo,” Sariss sighs, flicking to another screen. It enhances the view of the fight from another angle. They both sit back to watch. 

 

* * *

 

 

The fight spills into the chamber with the chasm. Their movements upset the mailocs—a few land stinging gouges on both her and Thrash, but disappear down the chasm after a few swings from both their staves kill the creatures that wander too close. 

 

Thrash is a relentless fighter, all heavy blows and blunt shoves. Rey dances out of his reach, trusting her memory as she moves him closer to the chasm. He’s not stupid, though. He senses the void before he steps into the thin air, ducking back towards her. Rey isn’t quick enough—the electrostaff’s pronged edges cut into her skin before he throws her into the stone wall behind her.

 

Rey screams as the staff buries clean through the meat of her shoulder, the prongs exiting out of her body to dig shallowly in the stone behind her. Sweat pops out on her brow as she tries to fight off a wave of nausea. 

 

“Pinned, rat. Smile for the masters—it’s the last time you’ll get to do it,” Thrash mutters in her ear, his hands closing around her throat. He pulls her off of the staff— _forward, slides the wound forward and walks her off of the electrostaff, screaming, toes scraping the floor_. Rey nearly loses consciousness and fights against the strain of his hands. He lifts her until her feet clear the floor, choking her.

 

Her vision spots. The pressure increases until her breath comes in thin, reedy inhales. 

 

She imagines an ocean in her before something ugly erupts in her mind and energy floods through her limbs. The pressure disappears from her throat and she throws her hands out. Thrash is jerked like a puppet into the air, his face slack with shock as she _seizes around his throat_ from a few meters away. Her fingers twist and Rey urges him over the void.

 

“Fuck you,” Rey spits out, forming her hand into a tight fist. She feels a mix of fear flood her veins—fear at this thing that lives in her chest, but the fear of dying at the hands of this animal trumps it.

 

Rey is part horrified and part amazed when the mere clenching of her hand twists Thrash’s head into an awkward hold. He screams, rife with panic before Rey furrows her brow and squeezes. The gesture twists his head cleanly around, his spine letting out a final crack as it separates. The body goes as limp as her ragdoll and Rey loosens her fingers. Whatever force was holding him up disappears. He falls into the chasm.

 

She doesn’t even hear his body hit the bottom.

 

* * *

 

“There it is!” Sariss shouts in surprise, exultant as she bangs her fists against the console’s keyboard. Kylo’s fingers tighten on his chair’s arms.

 

“She’s killed him,” Kylo notes, observing the flatline of Thrash’s heartbeat.

 

“More importantly, she used the Force. A very _strong_ manifestation of the Force,” Sariss insists, rewinding the feed to show Rey breaking Thrash’s neck again. And again. And once more. She’s enraptured. 

 

Kylo’s mind is still reeling with the sight. He feels a pull at his gut when the feed showing realtime playback in the chamber shows Rey falling to her knees, dropping her staff. Her heartbeat on the computer monitoring the tracking chip lets out an erratic pulse.

 

“She’s losing too much blood—I’m sending a droid in,” he decides. Sariss spins in her chair, staring wide-eyed at him.

 

“That violates the rules. Snoke would have even _your_ hide,” she warns him, but her comlink shrieking out a call cuts their brewing argument short.

 

“What?” she snaps out in annoyance. 

 

“What’s happening to the feeds?” Yun’s voice jumps out of the device in Sariss’s hand, thick with sleep. “I’m looking at my room’s terminal and all of them are rolling to blackout screens in sector six.”

 

Kylo glances up, realizing that one by one, the camera feeds in Rey’s sector are powering off. Yun curses as a low-pitched, sonorous thrum filters out of the audio feeds. Sariss stands, backing off from the vidscreen. Kylo grits his teeth, unmoved—he refuses to be spooked by spectral effects.

 

“It’s the dead,” mutters Sariss, almost too low for him to hear. She holds more than a few superstitions about this planet and looks almost unnerved by what is transpiring on the vidscreen. Kylo turns to the camera that is focused on Rey, feeling utterly _useless_ as the camera shutters. The image holds for a solid second before the feed terminates.

 

Rey’s heartbeat flatlines on the terminal monitor.

 

* * *

 

Someone is lifting her bodily, suspending her between their arms as they float over a black void. Warm, soft fabric brushes against her face.

 

A cup is pressed to her mouth. Time telescopes into a slow crawl. She’s laying on a clean pallet of blankets near a fire, shadows dancing on the vine-covered ceiling overhead. Rey witnesses an empire fall in a shadow play that feels like it lasts an entire day, tiny shadow claws snagging on shadow children to shovel them into the maw of some great beast.

 

Someone presses a wet cloth to her face, mopping the fever sweat from her brow as she thrashes. Rey hears the roar of the beast, bright blood spilling from her mouth. The father eats the son, the son eats the daughter—the mother sees _all and waits—_

 

A massive starburst as a planet dies. The ship pulls into the sky as Unkar Plutt pulls her back into the sand—it swallows the girl.

 

The masked man bends over her, his hands closing around her throat. “ _I have to_ ,” he insists, sounding almost heartbroken as she feels her lungs collapse and death takes her far.

 

A tall, thin creature whose skull sags lopsidedly. He offers her his hand.

 

Two figures fight—one bears a singular blade, the other wields two burning blades that emit from a long hilt. They hack at each other, the struggle eternal. Someone in the room is dead. Bright panels of red energy.

 

 _Rey—_ a man, warm voice colored like her own. She knows him.

 

A man dressed in black fights a creature in a mask. Heavy breathing. _He told me enough._

 

_He told me you killed him._

 

A couple fights, _this isn’t normal, Leia,_ while a young boy huddles under his blankets.

 

The island in the ocean, so _green—_

 

_Rey._

 

Rey jolts awake.

 

* * *

 

It feels like cotton is filling her mouth. Sleep grit lines her lashes. Rey lifts her hands, ignoring the sting in her shoulder as she scrubs the grit from her eyes. A voice comes from her right.

 

“You’ve been abed for nearly five days, my dear. I thought that fever would never break until you showed signs of improving yesterday morning. I tended your wounds and functions until you started coming around about an hour ago. Tea?”

 

“Please,” Rey manages. She’s a solid ninety percent sure she’s still hallucinating as someone presses a warm, earthenware cup into her hand. Frail arms scoop her shoulders up, propping her into a sitting position as the room comes into focus. It’s a stone-lined room with a vine covered ceiling, smoky from a small fire that is ventilated through a tiny hole in the ceiling. Beside her sits an old woman—human. Ancient. Hanks of silvery hair pool like thread in her lap. 

 

Rey takes a sip of the tea, grateful for its warmth as it slithers down her throat.

 

“Where am I?” she croaks, shifting her shoulder. There’s a poultice of some kind strapped to the wound that once gaped there, wet and fragrant with the smell of strange herbs. It still stings, but it’s a manageable pain.

 

“Somewhere safe. I found you at the edge of that hole in the lower sector—frightful place, if you ask me,” the old woman provides her with the nebulous explanation as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, stirring the metal pot over her low fire. Crates are stacked around the small space, trinkets strung up on the walls as plants bloom in well tended urns. It reminds Rey of home. 

 

“How’re you able to live here? How did you get _in_ here?” Rey asks, a pronounced stutter shaking her words. She firms her grip on the cup in her hand, finding a slab of fallen rock to brace herself against. She’s rank with the smell of fever-sweat and old clothes. All she smells of the old, drab woman is tea leaves and smoke. The room spins and Rey feels the brush of something...against her mind?

 

“I’m simply an old woman that makes her living here in these tombs, my dear. A scavenger, if you will,” the wizened creature is human, but possesses strange, rheumy eyes. It’s the irises staring back at her beneath the thick film of glaucoma that unnerve Rey the most. They appear almost yellow, strangely luminescent in the low light of the fire. 

 

“I thought this planet was uninhabited,” Rey chokes out, the burn of something added to the tea finally kicking in.

 

“That’s what we call a nip of swamp juice, sweeting. It’s bracing,” the old woman cackles, shaking a flask of liquid—probably alcohol—at Rey. She uncaps it to take a generous swig, smacking her thin lips. Even sitting, Rey can tell that the woman is stooped over with age, making her shorter than Rey with her hunched shoulders and frail build. Ratty, dark robes cover every inch of her. “What I should be asking,” the old woman begins, “is what are _you_ doing here?”

 

“Surviving,” Rey grits out, trying to shift herself further upright. The old woman tuts, flicking her fingers. Rey is gently pressed back against the stone slab and her heart begins to race. 

 

“No need to fear, my dear,” the old woman chides her, as if she senses the quickened beating of her heart, “after all—I’ve been waiting for _you_ for a very long while.”

 

“How long have you been waiting?” Rey asks, every instinct she possesses screaming at her to get up and run. Everything about this woman and this room is wrong, disguised as something frail and familiar. She’s Old Traz and her bolthole back on Jakku come back to life, trying to lure Rey into a sense of false security. 

 

The old woman smiles. 

 

“You know as well as I that any attempt to outrun me will end up with me simply catching you, dear,” the old woman scolds her, almost motherly. But the threat lies beneath the words and Rey feels fresh panic flood her veins. She starts groping around for something to throw at the woman.

 

“More to the point, I’ve got to be sending you on your way soon. The doors will be opening and soon those four will be collecting you, if they can. But that _beastly_ thing is sleeping right across the doorjamb, the lout. You’ll have to kill him.” Lancing something in the pot, the old woman spiders her fingers across the fire to catch a bit of burning wood between her fingers. She suspends it for a few seconds, throwing the cinder into the pot.

 

“Why can’t you kill it? I’m as weak as a newborn,” Rey’s protest seems to irk the old woman, making her head snap up and her yellow, terrible eyes narrow in on her.

 

“You’re not. _Excuses_ —you could run miles without losing your breath and leap great distances if you’d stop yammering around in that airy head of yours and focus,” the old woman snaps. Suddenly her face fills Rey’s vision. How did she get so _close_?

 

The old woman flicks her eyes over Rey’s face and seems to remember herself, slinking back across the floor on all fours to rummage in a crate. The tea boils over, sloshing into the fire. It fills the room with steam until the woman crooks her fingers, suspending the pot in the air until the room clears out and the fire burns clean.

 

Rey watches her back for a long time, her search turning up two items in her hands. The old woman shuffles back over to Rey on her knees, offering out a strangely shaped object. It’s in the shape of a tetrahedron and is lined with black stone, red runes etched into the glossy surface. It’s no bigger than a fruit pit and fits comfortably in Rey’s palm, warming her hand as she turns it over in her fingers.

 

“You’re giving me a rock?” Rey ventures, amusement coloring her tone for the first time.

 

The old woman huffs. “A _rock_. What cheek! What is that old spacer’s saying—a star to steer her by? This certainly will help you in the years to come, my dear. It’s done so for many a young woman of your stature—think of it as a source of guidance. A touchstone,” the old woman’s voice is warm and familiar as she watches Rey touch the object. Rey tucks it away in her breastband, grimacing as she feels filth and grime caking her joints. 

 

The old woman turns over the next thing in her hands to Rey. A hilt of some kind. “The other thing I wanted to give to you—a weapon more suited to managing what guards the exit. A lovely young man brought it back to me only a decade ago, so thoughtful of him. It’s been lost for years. Ah, but your time is shortening. Already the last acolyte struggles to keep alive— ah. There he goes,” the old woman murmurs, glancing at something unseen on the wall behind. She tips her head, listening to a noise that Rey can’t hear. 

 

Rey’s guts twist with fear.

 

The old woman’s rheumy eyes settle on Rey once more. “Don’t be afraid, child. After all, you’re the most dangerous thing in this tomb. You’re power incarnate—you simply have to open yourself up to the Force and _realize_ yourself,” she advises, stretching out a long, crooked finger to touch a pointed nail to Rey’s cheek. 

 

“What is this _force_?” Rey asks, clenching the cup and the hilt in her hands. 

 

The woman’s eyes hood with irritation. Not at Rey—at something else. “This generation is truly hopeless if all mention of the Sith and Jedi is now reduced to mere myth.” 

 

“I’ve heard of them. Legends of the Jedi, but now I see the Sith apparently were very real,” Rey insists, huddling into the stone behind her. She clutches the long hilt to her breast. The old woman takes her spot by the fire, picking up her cup of tea once more.

 

“Ah, so you have. This was a great temple, once. It was built to honor the deeds of one great lord and many Sith passed through its halls to test their mettle against the madness it could inspire in their minds. Thousands of years of strife—it collapsed after a great battle between the old Sith emperor and a hero of the Jedi. What you’ve seen is only a small fraction of the temple still accessible near the old Kaas City subdistricts...” the old woman trails off. Rey notices that the spoon she’d been absently stirring in the tea now churns the murky liquid itself, unaided by the wizened fingers of the woman as it is propelled along by some unseen hand.

 

The old woman notices her attention drop to the cup in her lap. She gently stills the spoon stirring itself by placing her palm over the top of the cup, catching the utensil between her fingers. “But I digress. What do they call you?”

 

“I’m not sure if I should give you my name,” Rey tells her, mindful of the warning the dead prospect scratched into the wall. 

 

“A name doesn’t give me power over you, dear—tell me your name,” the woman goads, waving her hand in front of Rey’s eyes. She leans forward expectantly, confusion crossing her face when Rey merely purses her lips at her.

 

“Resistant. Your will is iron. Now stop dawdling and look at what I’ve given you,” the old woman insists, bringing her cup up to her wizened lips. Rey glances down at the hilt in her lap. 

 

A long hilt—metal of some kind. It flies out of her lap and into the hands of the old woman. She hits the ignition switch along the hilt and light blooms upward. It’s reminiscent of the burning blade the masked man carries, but this hilt has no exposed wires or shoddy structure. Both the beam and the hilt it issues from are seamless and smooth, a refined weapon. 

 

The old woman offers it out to her, hilt first. The added weight of the laser blade make it strangely lighter. The hilt is roughly the length of her arm from where her elbow starts to the tips of her fingers, unexpectedly solid in her grip when she holds it properly. 

 

“Bane’s Heart—I called it after one of the crystals that powers the blades. Built for women of our size—the blades are smaller, which gives you greater speed and maneuverability in battle. You give up the reach longer blades provide, but you gain defense with how tightly you can control your sphere of influence on the field,” the old woman rambles on, urging Rey to her feet as she stands. 

 

“Touch the other activation switch along the bottom, pull it. Hold it like you do your quarterstaff, dear,” she reminds her. Rey feels the switch and another blade blooms from the emitter shroud. The saber is as long as her quarterstaff and the weight is almost identical.

 

“Red—like a laigrek’s eye,” the old woman sighs, running her fingertip up the blade. Rey notices how close her fingertips get to the laser and imagines the incredible heat she must feel, but the woman shows no sign of discomfort. 

 

“Don’t just stand there—hit something. You’re about to slay the beast and this is about as good a tutorial as you’re getting.” The old woman shoos her to a fallen pillar, urging her on with the flick of her fingers.

 

The blades, like the masked man’s, have sounds. They chorus on striking the stone, scoring deep, thick gouges in the rock. Rey’s limbs lose some of their leaden feeling the more she moves. Her shoulder doesn’t ache as much. 

 

“Good—again,” the old woman instructs, finding a seat on a fallen slab of rock.

 

Rey hits the stone again.

 

* * *

 

An hour later, Rey has worked herself into a sweat and the old woman is fiddling with her tea cup. Her shoulder is a distant burn. The more tea she drinks, the old woman insists, the less it will hurt. Rey feels her vision narrow into laser-fine focus. 

 

“The doors are opening soon, my dear. Freedom is only a breath away,” the old woman tells her, motioning to a curtain of vines that cover the only exit in the room. Rey kills the blades on the hilt, wavering on her feet. She tries to catch her breath, sweat purling down her limbs in this stuffy, overheated room. The old woman watches her carefully. 

 

“The beast lives deeper down that passageway in a great hall—it sleeps. Have you felt it?” the old woman asks her. Rey nods—she can—before walking forward.

 

Rey lifts her arm to tug the vines away, clearing enough space for her to step out of the well-lit room the old woman sits in. The darkness of the hall rushes forward to eat her once more. This time, the ignition of one of the blades chases the darkness back. 

 

She holds the blade closer to her face, bathing her body in red.

 

* * *

 

“Her signal is back—she’s alive,” Tremayne tells all of them over the intercom. 

 

The night of the seventh day is fast approaching and all the prospects have been presumed dead. A mystery plaguing the four people in the compound for the past few days are the whereabouts of Kylo Ren’s prospect. After the cameras had surged back online with maintenance from the probe droids they sent in, a thorough scan of the entire temple showed an absence of her life signs. 

 

Kylo has been in the sparring ring with Yun, taking his frustration out on the bigger knight with powerful blows that Yun simply throws back with tenfold the force. Tremayne’s announcement catches him off-guard and Yun takes the opening, knocking Kylo straight off his feet with an uppercut.

 

The younger man doesn’t have time to throw a kick in retaliation. He lets his pride take the hit more than his body, scrambling to his feet as both he and Yun rush out of the training room to the hall. Their long strides eat up the distance between the training wing and the control room—Sariss skids out of her room and looks like she’s come straight from the ‘fresher, wringing water out of her hair as she scrambles to step into leg-wraps.

 

“Does the Supreme Leader know?” Kylo immediately asks as he catches sight of Rey on the vidscreen when the three of them barge into the control room. She’s emerging from behind a wall comprised of solid stone in some unknown wing. Her gait is strange, as if she’s in a trance or drugged. She makes a motion like she’s lifting an obstruction out of her way and there is an object held tightly in her dominant hand.

 

“He’s been advised—so have the other knights. That’s them tuning in,” Tremayne nods to the various pings coming out of a transponder. Everyone in the galaxy with access to these feeds—a scant handful of people—watching, their interest renewed now that there is a survivor. 

 

“What the kriff is she holding?” Sariss mutters, squinting as she leans closer to the screen to observe the long, cylindrical object held in Rey’s hands.

 

When the blade ignites, everyone in the room holds their breath. 

 

Kylo feels the floor lurch under his feet.

 

* * *

 

The chamber echoes with the sounds of her steps. 

 

Everything seems magnified. She can feel the creature’s lungs as they inflate and deflate with each intake of air. It sleeps just twenty paces to her right, curled on its side. Rey smells the fresh blood wetting the floor of its lair, bones of dead prospects littering the stone floor. Some were alive only hours ago—Rey can feel the flickering echo of their last thoughts.

 

She feels like an alien is inhabiting her skin and she’s watching it move with her face and body from a great distance. The beast’s form is in front of her, massive. It should hear her.

 

It only stirs when she ignites the second blade, jabbing out with its terrible claws. Rey has no notion of how she can move like this, as if every motion the beast plans on making is clearly in her mind before it makes it. She vaults over the swinging limb, landing behind it to score burning marks against its hide before she dances away. 

 

The beast roars. It keeps up a constant, lunging gait towards her, standing on its hind legs before knuckling back on its claws. It overreaches and draws back a stump when it tries to snatch at her again, her blade cutting clean through tendon and bone. Rey advances on it, putting it on the defense for the first time in probably centuries as she backs it towards the darker half of the hall—where the doors stand ready. Freedom. 

 

Her blades sing.

 

 _This is Juyo_ , the old woman says in her mind, gleeful, _and how wonderful you are at it._

 

Rey stops, realizing how damn _silly_ fighting this beast must seem. A laugh bubbles up in her throat. Utterly ridiculous. She turns her mind on the sluggish, black stain edging away from her mind and insists herself on its will. It snaps like rusted girders under the weight of her suggestion. 

 

The beast stops in its tracks, slinking its gangly arms low to the floor as its mouth goes slack in a mix of either shock or surprise. It’s somewhat sentient and Rey can smell fear radiating off its hide as it looks at her.

 

“ _Kneel_ ,” she hisses at it, pointing the tip of her blade at the floor. The creature bends, guttering on a growl. Rey swings her blade in an arc, cutting clear through something vital that pumps blood to this thing’s heart. It falls to the floor, twitching in its death throes as Rey backs off to avoid the wildly spasming limbs.

 

Soon it jerks still and Rey feels the flickering life force, the black stain, disappear from this plane.

 

Rey is shaking. She feels tears of exhaustion seep down her cheeks as she deactivates the lower blade on the staff. Everything is fine until she looks down at the body of the thing she’s just killed. The anger is back, swallowing her vision as she screams.

 

Her lone blade sings off the creature’s hide, slicing through. It’s dead already, but Rey feels a point needs to be made. She hacks and swings, gouges and scours—she’s cut clear through the flesh and thick, hot drops of its blood now cover her from head to toe. Still she swings, screaming until her lungs burn and the energy evaporates from her body. 

 

Only when her blade reaches the stones beneath the creature’s body does she stop, the ache in her shoulder magnified by the jolt of her saber catching on the thicker, almost impenetrable rock lining the floor. 

 

* * *

 

“She just killed a terentatek. She made the terentatek _lay down and let her kill it_ ,” Sariss says, every word imbued with disbelief. Yun has his mouth open wide enough to catch a Caridian lokfly. Tremayne is vacillating between sweating and shaking his head in wonder, scratching nervously at the cybernetics that cover his jaw.

 

Kylo is already running out of the room, pulling on his robes as he makes his way to the hangar. 

 

* * *

 

Rey doesn’t have the strength to lift her head when the vague outline of someone’s legs obscure her field of vision. She’s bent forward on her hands and knees, taking shaky gulps of breath. The saberstaff is laying beneath her fingers.

 

Someone tips her chin up, forcing Rey to look at them as they crouch close. It’s the old woman. Only she’s not old—how could Rey be so damn _blind_? The disguise is all too obvious, wispy cobwebs of energy stringing around the echo of whoever this woman was. Long, thick lines of some archaic ink bisect her eyes—the irises blaze yellow in the light of the tomb. Long, winding limbs and richly appointed robes aren’t what make her seem so physically imposing—it’s the way she carries herself, as if nothing can best her.

 

“You’re a Sith,” Rey manages to choke out, her fingers tightening around the saber hilt she has pressed to the floor. 

 

“She _was_ a Sith. You’re speaking to a mere memory of her—an afterthought. Everything she was, what I am, is in this—try not to lose me.” Her gloved fingers rest on Rey’s chest, pressing an indent of the tiny object beneath the fabric into Rey’s skin.

 

“What makes you think I won’t toss this thing and this hilt into the closest river I can find?” Rey spits out, rage filling her up. She hates this place, _hates these people_ , hates this _woman—_

 

“There you are, Rey. You’ve found yourself down here,” the woman praises her, cupping her face between her hands. The touch is motherly and it makes Rey’s stomach churn and her heart twist with its familiarity. 

 

“Once you make it out of here, they will seize this and the saber from you,” she puts a hand on Rey’s breastbone, pressing the tetrahedron beneath until the strange, heavy metal it’s made of bites more marks into her flesh. “But not to worry—your young man will most assuredly show you how to construct some excuse of a lightsaber to use until your freedom is earned. And of course, I don’t need to be too awfully far from the holocron to have a chat with you,” she assures Rey, propping her up. The Sith feels almost real, but still so much like an afterthought—Rey finds the sensation hard to put in words.

 

Rey wavers on her feet, opening her mouth to ask _what young man_ before the sound of the magnetic locks holding the stone doors closed signal her deliverance from this hellhole. The woman walks her towards the widening gap of light, her feet making no sound on the stone while Rey hears her own steps as clear as day. The temple doors slowly grind open and Rey is left staring out at the jungle beyond as the woman vanishes beneath her outreached arm. 

 

The girl stumbles out into the dying twilight. Rain is coming down hard. She can’t go further than the plinths that mark the start of the jungle before her knees give out. A faraway part of her brain, more clinical and analytical than the baser instincts powering her right now, recognizes it as shock.

 

Rey is ready for whatever vicious creature that lives in this jungle to come eat her. She’s tired. She’s done.

 

But the familiar sound of a speeder’s repulsorlift powering down reaches her ears before the heavy, familiar tread starts up. It’s him. When Rey looks up, the rain washes the blood off her face in small rivulets. 

 

He’s young. Long and angular. She can pick out constellations in the moles and freckles spangling his skin. After checking her over for the most evident of her injuries he lifts her up, spreading her weight between his arms. 

 

“I’m Rey,” she tells him, because names are important.

 

“Kylo,” he says, his voice clear and deep. A warm, comforting weight presses against her mind and she knows it’s him _there_ as well. Rey lets the blackness coloring the corners of her vision take her down into that deep well once more.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The object Rey is now carrying is a [Sith holocron](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_holocron/Legends) \- the inhabitant of the holocron and the aforementioned mysterious woman now comfortably haunting Rey is [Darth Zannah](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Zannah), the second half of the original 'Rule of Two' and Darth Bane's former apprentice - right up until she killed him. She lived roughly a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin and is probably one of the most powerful female Darths to exist in canon and the EU. 
> 
> She wielded a double-bladed saber known as [Bane's Heart](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bane%27s_Heart_\(lightsaber\)). 
> 
> For those unfamiliar with how holocrons work, we'll get to that in the plot. As always, your feedback is appreciated and always eagerly waited on. Read on!


	5. ACT I: The Abduction, Part V

**ACT V: The Abduction, Part V**

 

 **“S** he must be silenced—quickly. The girl’s powers are too wild and unchecked to be honed into anything resembling control by our teachings—save for the Supreme Leader, no one can temper whatever crawled into her mind in that temple. If she is allowed to train among us, she could develop into something that will undermine the knights,” Tremayne spins his argument to Yun and Sariss in the control room.

 

“Which is exactly why the Supreme Leader should decide if she’s to be trained or exterminated, Tremayne. Not by your order. If any one has any right to decide what’s to be done about the girl, it’s him,” Yun drones back, the thrum of his voice strong and echoing. 

 

Kylo can hear them clear down the hall as he makes his way back towards them, keeping his steps light and slow to better hear their thoughts on the matter.

 

He’d deposited Rey’s unconscious body in the medbay, her mind still deeply submerged in sleep after a few prodding suggestions from his own will. When Kylo left, a 2-1B medical droid was puzzling over her strong heartbeat and thrumming neurological readouts. He had stayed long enough to retrieve the strange object lodged in the folds of her tunic, held tight against her chest by her slowly spasming hand. It was as if something compelled her to hold onto it even in the deepest of dreams. 

 

The saberstaff already hangs from his belt, hitting his leg with every step he takes towards the control room. His fist tightens around the shape pressed into his palm—a _holocron_. In his other hand is the wadded mess of bandaging he’d carefully stripped from Rey’s supposedly injured shoulder—when he'd seen it, the puckered scar tissue around the entry wound looked months old versus the true six day age of the wound. The electrostaff should’ve severed her subclavian artery and left Rey dead on the temple floor. It did sever her subclavian artery, according to a scan the 2-1B droid preformed.

 

When the knight finally turns the corner that opens on the control room, Tremayne and Yun are hovering dangerously close to one another. They’re clearly posturing, the reflexively clenching and unclenching of hands a subtle tell of how close they are to escalating a seemingly benign difference of opinion to a larger power play. And while Kylo believes Yun might have superior strength over Tremayne, the inquisitor isn’t to be underestimated. All three of the knights turn to him as he enters. The two men break off from one another and slink back to their respective ends of the room, their eyes still fixed on one another.

 

“This is the part where you two break the thick tension by kissing passionately,” Sariss mutters at the vidscreen after she turns her back to the room, playing clips of Rey’s one-sided fight with the terentatek. Yun’s noise of disgust comes at the same time as Tremayne’s snort of derision. 

 

“I’d sooner stick my tongue down a tuk’ata’s throat,” is the sharp reply from Yun, scrubbing his jaw as he squints at the inquisitor. Kylo ignores the bickering that crops up after that barb is thrown, joining Sariss at the vidscreen as the two men argue behind him. She turns her face up to him, an eyebrow arching in piqued interest at the items in his hands.

 

He hands off the wad of gauze, crusted with old blood— _her blood—_ to Sariss. She turns it over in her hand, pursing her lips at the spread of paste matting the material. Her fingers pry apart the paste to reveal a flaky pulp beneath, showing stringy clots of blood intermingled with the living pinks and reds of crushed plant bulbs. The woman seems to make her mind up after bending her face towards the bandaging—close enough to let some identifying scent filter through her senses.

 

Sariss tosses the bandaging into a nearby wastebasket, tugging her gloves higher on her wrists. “Nysillin—alternatively known as sillum. It’s a powerful analgesic and coagulant with absolutely no business existing on Dromund Kaas in its plant form. It’s native to Felucia and as far as I know that planet is the sole exporter. You crush the bulb of a mature plant and it bleeds that milk—synthesize the liquid and you have one of the most powerful topical healing medicines in the known galaxy.” 

 

“How could the plant get in the temple in any of its forms?” he asks, his face tilting up towards the vidscreens. 

 

“It _couldn't_  have gotten into the temple. It has to be stored in cryotubes if you’re going to leave a cut bulb out for more than a day—otherwise it will denature and become ineffective. We’re the only ships besides smugglers that come into this star system, and they know better than to set foot on this planet,” Sariss rambles, restlessly tapping her nails against the console. “I don’t know any reason as to why it should be down in the tombs, save for someone deliberately placing it there.” Her words taper to a slow stop as he extends his other hand to her, opening it to show the tetrahedron. It gleams like a small black jewel in his glove.

 

Sariss doesn’t pick it up. Every inch of her body seems to strain away from it once she gives it a cursory glance. The men behind them stop arguing and move over to them. “ _A holocron?_ ” says Tremayne, his tone incredulous.

 

“Not unusual to find in a Sith tomb,” Yun adds in, looming over the back of Sariss’s chair to get a better look at the object.

 

“It could be how she managed to find her way out of the sublevels. And the advanced combat style she developed. It might’ve even guided her to wherever that saberstaff was being stored—possibly in a cache or a sarcophagus,” Sariss ventures her hand out to tap lightly on a smooth side of the holocron. The letters flare red and everyone but Kylo—who is _holding the damn thing—_ reels back.

 

“This still doesn’t explain how she walked out of a solid wall and survived a wound like that. Let alone for six days. Or the vidfeed blackouts and unresponsive tracking chip,” Tremayne barks out after the hieroglyphics stop burning. “Her strength during the fight with the terentatek was just as abnormal.”

 

“If you could call _that_ a fight. It was a massacre,” Yun corrects him.

 

“She survived on Jakku her entire life in a semblance of independence—not only survived, but thrived. Her skill with a saberstaff isn’t a stretch to believe if you’d have seen how she handled the quarterstaff she carried around before we took her off-world,” Kylo directs towards Tremayne. 

 

“That doesn’t explain how she can execute a series of complex maneuvers belonging to a lightsaber form that hasn’t had a true practitioner since the Clone Wars,” hisses Tremayne, pointing out another clip on the vidscreen.

 

Kylo has only read about Juyo, the seventh form, and its lesser subform of Vaapad. There are only coded diagrams and scattered snips of corrupted data pages from dusty archives, incomplete and scrambled after the fall of the Empire. Even the antiquated scrolls that recovery teams bring back from Moraband and the deeper reaches of the tombs on Dromund Kaas are incomplete or damaged. Juyo and Vaapad are forms that were lost to the ages until today. 

 

“It’s likely that she had help from the holocron with all of this,” Kylo finally settles on something he was reluctant to believe in the first place—something might’ve very well gotten into Rey’s mind. It wasn’t unheard of, these possessions. They were relegated to myth and theory, but existed none the less.

 

“Results like these are why we need to just dump the next batch of hopefuls into a sandpit with a ronto hyped up on stims. Ghosts and holocrons complicate things,” Yun says, shooting Tremayne a scathing glance. Tremayne is the original architect of this process. This is the first selection that Kylo has witnessed.

 

A terminal on the other wall chirps. Sariss wheels herself over to it.

 

“The holoterminal is going off,” Sariss says over her shoulder as an advisory crawls across the screen. Kylo barely has time to register her words before she adds, “the _main_ holoterminal.” 

 

Their prior debate falls flat and dies on the control room floor as all four knights straighten up, making for the door as they tug up collars and hoods after clamping helms back over their bare faces.

 

* * *

 

As is customary, everyone is kneeling before the holoprojector in the cavernous communications room in the deepest sublevel of the complex. Other shimmering bodies flicker before their transmissions stabilize, filling the room with a static-laden blue glow until twenty more knights are kneeling in various parts of the galaxy to receive the Supreme Leader’s transmission. 

 

In the center forms a massive projection, doubling over a couple of meters in height before solidifying into the form of their master. All of the knights kneeling tip their faces forward, bowing their bodies further to the ground as Snoke’s transmission stabilizes and the audio feed comes online.

 

“Sons and daughters in the Force,” he rumbles, bowing his head at the loud murmur of a joined greeting.

 

“Hail, Supreme Leader,” they chorus back.

 

“We end this month’s cycle with a successful and _lively_ selection process. Congratulations are owed to Kylo Ren, best among us at this very hour as he is the one who brought forward this worthy candidate to join our order. Who so objects to the motion brought before you?”

 

Silence fills the room until Tremayne stands, then two more. The vast majority of the knights hover undecidedly between kneeling and glancing up to observe those that would speak against Rey’s admission into the Knights of Ren. 

 

Snoke’s sagging brow inclines towards Tremayne. “Speak your objections, Antinnis Tremayne.”

 

“Supreme Leader, the girl cannot be allowed to join if such a power dominates her mind. If anything, we should suspend her admission into the order and examine this possession by the holocron more closely. If a Sith spirit truly did help her survive the trial, it’s likely that it remains within her. It should be studied, not brought into the fold. We run the risk opening ourselves to an internal danger,” Tremayne’s voice is strong, carrying over the bent heads. It rallies the two that stand in agreement with him—already their arguments brew concerning this _scavenger_ unworthy of their ranks and possessing a power that they cannot understand.

 

Kylo thinks of interrogation droids ripping up his prospect as Tremayne watches, trying to root out the power in her body down to a cellular level until nothing of her is left but a slab of flesh on an examination table. The image brings him to his feet.

 

“Are you concurring with Inquisitor Tremayne’s assessment, Kylo Ren?” Snoke asks, his gaze settling on him. Kylo feels the weight of his mind cracking under the strain of his master’s inquisitive prods, even with the distance of an entire galaxy between them. 

 

A dark murmur fills the back of his mind as he speaks.

 

“I disagree, Supreme Leader. She’s shown no signs of possession and the holocron remains mostly unresponsive to our presence. It’s likely that its gatekeeper simply used her as a sort of vehicle to escape the temple—it’s not uncommon for objects embed with a personality of their own to want to escape from Sith tombs. Now that the holocron is in our possession, it could be a great asset to the order—dangerous, as the inquisitor is suggesting, but a danger we can harness.”

 

“How are you so certain of this? Of _course_ she wouldn’t exhibit signs of possession! No parasite is stupid enough to expose itself—” Tremayne barks, but is cut short by a terrible rumbling from Snoke.

 

“ _Kneel_ ,” Snoke roars, the force of his words driving everyone still standing to their knees. Kylo’s mask scrapes the ground. Tremayne is completely flattened under the force of Snoke’s will, his robes snagging on the rough stone of the floor.

 

“The girl will neither live nor die by my decision or any other’s save for Kylo Ren. The Knights of Ren have endured for years and weathered much harsher trials—a simple holocron borne by a scrap of a girl cannot topple everything we’ve built. Kylo Ren, do you so swear to carry out judgement that best serves the First Order?”

 

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” pours out of his mouth without any initiative from his mind, which screams.

 

“Sariss Ren, Yun Ren—do you both so swear to aid your brother in this endeavor?” Snoke’s terrible eyes wrench free from Kylo to focus on the two kneeling behind his bent form.

 

“We so swear it, Supreme Leader,” their synchronized voices float over his shoulder.

 

“That settles the matter. The girl’s fate is in the hands of her master. Knight Sariss—keep the holocron and discern what you can from it. But be cautious of the sealing spells on it. Don’t let the girl get near it unless I give the directive.”

 

“Master,” Sariss intones, a clink sounding—she must’ve touched her masked face to the floor.

 

“Knights Yun and Sariss will remain as instructors for the girl should Kylo Ren decide to spare her life and take her on as an apprentice. If she is executed, they will resume their normal duties. Inquisitor Tremayne is to return with the saberstaff to the capital to await my orders. The rest of you continue your business as usual and await my orders.”

 

At Snoke’s gesture, Kylo unclips the saberstaff from where it hangs on his belt. He imagines igniting both of the blades and throwing it to Tremayne to see if the old man catches it with his face, but restrains himself. Tremayne takes the calmly offered hilt with a seething posture, pocketing it in a voluminous sleeve as he sets his robes to rights.

 

The knights bow to Snoke in unison—Kylo can feel their breathing catch as they all wait for dismissal, even through lightyears of distance.

 

“Everyone get out,” mutters Snoke, “with the exception of Kylo Ren.” 

 

The three physically with him in the communications room back out after low, scraping bows are made. The knights transmitting from parts unknown mirror the genuflecting gestures as their signals terminate. 

 

“Come forward, my son,” Snoke rumbles when the hiss of the airlock closing on the three standing in the hallway reaches their ears. “I suppose you have a great many questions to ask of me. Speak as you will,” he waves his massive hand, giving Kylo the wordless gesture of assent as he unclasps the mask from his face to speak to his master without any barriers. 

 

“Master, how is it that you knew where she was?” he manages, the question that has been burning in his mind for weeks the first thing to spill out of his mouth.

 

Snoke simply chuckles, as if explaining this was the simplest thing in the world. His master has a way of simplifying things—everything is so clear with him, unclouded. “Happenstance. She was a flicker that should’ve never registered—a tiny spark that caught my eye as I extended my reach towards someone I was searching for. I found her clinging at the edge of my mind—a forgotten, lonely thing. But brightly burning with great potential. I foresaw that she could be a great asset to our order, if she should only _bend_.”

 

“From what I’ve seen, it’s unlikely that she will take our offer. The Light is strong within her, master—could you not feel it?” He thinks of splitting her open with his saber—the gut, the neck—which would be quicker if she should refuse? Something in him balks at the thought.

 

Snoke’s smile is terrible as it unfurls across his malformed expression. “I felt it, my young apprentice, and it is precisely the reason why I had you seek her out instead of leaving her to rot in that far flung corner of the galaxy—as forgotten as the hollowed out bones of the ships she scrounged in. It will all come to you in time. Until then I leave the decision in your hands, Kylo Ren. Either kill her or keep her—the power to choose her fate is yours.”

 

* * *

 

“I take it Tremayne has left or is in the process of leaving,” Kylo comments as the three of them tromp towards the medbay. His mask is back on and his temper has cooled somewhat after speaking with his master. Snoke has a habit of centering his focus into a keen point.

 

“You’re correct—the cyborg is leaving with your girl’s saber. It’s a shame. I haven’t seen a real one in ages—would’ve liked to have held it at least once, if only to remember,” Yun trails off.

 

“Maybe it’s best that we don’t tempt ourselves. You remember how Supreme Leader barely let Kylo keep his _device_ after he constructed it,” Sariss gestures to Kylo’s waist, where the tattered mess of metal and wires hangs from his belt. Kylo makes a noise of agreement.

 

They enter the medbay to the chirping of monitors and the staccato beat of Rey’s heartbeat. She’s buried under wires and tubes as the droids bustle around her, a respirator clamped firmly over her lower face that clouds with her breath. The droids have cut away the stained training blacks that have been her only coverings for the past week and laced her into a medical tunic that covers her from nape to knees.

 

Sariss and Yun almost fidget around her for the span of a breath—finally Sariss breaks away to stoop low near Rey’s head, her mask turning as she examines the girl up and down. Her gloved fingers pause over her brow, just barely touching the sweat-beaded skin of the girl on the examination table. Yun joins her, pressing a hand to Sariss’s back to join her link. Kylo takes up guard on her other side, letting the other two take her measure. A strange fizzle of... _pride_ is tightening in his chest.

 

“Oh, but she’s powerful,” breathes Sariss after a minute of silent, furtive searching—she must be skimming the surface of Rey’s mind, feeling out the deep well of power Kylo knows now exists at the very root of her being. 

 

Rey’s eyes slowly slide open and the 2-1B droid squawks, “The patient is under heavy sedation and should not be emerging from her REM cycle at this time!”

 

“Well, she’s obviously fought off the drugs,” Yun speculates, leaning close. Rey’s pupils contract at the light glinting off his mask’s visor. Suddenly the three of them and the bevy of medical droids are blown back by a tidal force as Rey _screams_. Kylo’s back cracks against the sole window in the medbay, scraping down as gravity resumes its regularly scheduled programing. 

 

He sees Yun picking himself off the droid he just crushed under his weight and Sariss’s body language is downright dazed as she stumbles to pick herself out of the wreckage of a medical supply cart. She disengages the clasps of her mask, sucking in lungfuls of air as she watches the girl try to rip every line of plastoid pumping sedatives and medicine into her body, various wires scraped off with every swipe of her long limbs. Rey hasn’t stopped screaming, wild panic and fury twisting her expression. Kylo can’t even pick out Rey’s thoughts in the pouring torrent of feedback pushing into his mind. It nearly knocks him back on his ass.

 

Sariss stares. “Simply amazing. She made it out in one piece and appears to be only mildly catatonic and dehydrated. No severe signs of trauma. Any psychological setbacks can be modified to suit her training.” 

 

Rey screams her throat raw, thrashing against the bindings holding her fast to the examination table. A burst of glass as the window behind him shatters startles Sariss and Yun further back towards the door to the medical unit, but Kylo digs his heels in despite the threat of getting sprayed with a fine mist of transparisteel shrapnel as it whips in a storm around the medbay. 

 

Kylo kicks the downed 2-1B droid into an upright state with a well-aimed swing of his leg, snarling, “ _Put her back under, damnit._ ” The droid scrambles to amp up the flow of sedatives before Rey can articulate her rage into pulling the roof down on them.

 

The storm of shrapnel dies down as Rey slumps under the weight of the drugs flooding her veins, choked whimpers escaping her throat. Tears bead towards her temples. Finally, she sleeps—open eyed, but asleep. 

 

“Alright, maybe not _mildly_ catatonic,” Sariss amends her earlier statement, dabbing her cut cheek with a strip of gauze she snatches from the crushed medical supply cart. “But all that rage is going to make her a splendidly powerful knight.”

 

“Amazing,” Yun says under his breath, stripping a glove off to press his hand against the crushed medical cart. It looks like something has seized it around the middle and folded the sheets of alloy like foil. “She did that. I’ve not see a full Force crush since Jerec was alive.”

 

“We’re going to need stronger transparisteel,” Kylo mutters, stalking out of the medbay. He dodges a herd of mouse droid whirring in to start the cleanup process.

 

He chooses to ignore Sariss’s comment that trails after him. “Your apprentice might manage to top even _your_ repair costs in material damages, Kylo.”

 

* * *

 

Dawn. And he still hasn’t come to a solid decision. He intercepts Yun on his way to the training wing, who is maskless and in training blacks.

 

The bigger man is chugging something sludge-colored from a clear canister, adjusting a towel over his shoulder as he halts his stride to greet him. “Tremayne left with your shuttle and troopers this morning, all parties ready to get off this rock. He took the saberstaff with him and left the holocron with Sariss. Now she’s locked herself in the hololibrary for the time being.”

 

“I’ll speak to her after I deal with the girl.” 

 

Yun only raises his eyebrow at that, chugging another fifth of whatever protein concoction is in that bottle. Kylo’s stomach turns as he remembers the last time he tried Yun’s supplements made to add on muscle mass. He recalls the taste as a mix of wet Wookiee and rancid Jawa Juice.

 

Yun draws the bottle away from his face. “High command comm’d us last night to advise they’d be circling around for pickup after a six month exercise in wild space on the _Vengeance._ Until then, all four of us are stuck on Dromund Kaas. Our transport left atmo barely after Sariss and I put our boots on the ground. Our troopers looked spooked enough just by being in the star system.” 

 

“This planet isn’t for the weak minded,” Kylo says as he turns his back on Yun, starting towards the hololibrary instead of the medical unit. 

 

“It’s not even for our minds in large quantities, Ren,” Yun shouts at his retreating back. “I’ll be in the weight room—should probably rally with our _sister_ and get a plan formulated. We’ll help you either dump the girl’s body or train her up properly, whatever you decide.”

 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

 

* * *

 

Sariss spins the holocron in her fingers. Kylo found her wedged between two databanks, her holopad streaming with downloads as she works to extract what she can from the old archives. Various tools—archaeological in nature—are spread over the only workbench in the cramped server room. 

 

“If the carbon dating isn’t lying, it dates the construction of this particular holocron to roughly a thousand years ago,” Sariss turns the holocron with her gloved hands, light illuminating what he thought were oblique, polished sides. Inspecting the object at a closer angle reveal the many sides of the holocron to be comprised of crystalline lattices interlocking in countless, minuscule layers that are somewhat translucent under thorough lighting. They are the color of old blood when Sariss tilts them towards the overhead lamp hanging near the databanks. 

 

“Almost as old as you,” he speculates. It’s worth the venomous look she shoots him. He cracks a smirk.

 

“Kylo makes a joke. I’ll mark the occasion down on my calendar. I can still toss you clean across the sparring yard with a _thought_ , no matter how strong you are with that nightlight you call a saber.”

 

“Back to the pressing topic—have you figured it out?” he gestures towards the holocron. Sariss makes a murmur he classifies as a mix between yes and no.

 

“Your apprentice must’ve earned the approval or met some standard that the gatekeeper had concerning what you could consider a threshold. They found something worthy in her and disseminated the information the original artificer of this holocron embedded in the matrices—pressed some rough mold of their knowledge and experiences into her subconsciousness, building on what was already there. Sort of an osmosis. It took her preternatural abilities and magnified them with the resurgent living Force within, guiding her.”

 

“My apprentice?” he asks, amusement at Sariss’s presumptions. 

 

“You’re not planning on killing her are you?” she scoffs, handing off the holocron to him as she rummages for a new tool from the workbench. “Wait. Don’t answer that—I don’t want to know. I’d rather deal with things as they come, whatever you decide.”

 

He turns the holocron over in his palm, listening to her voice of warning when she sees him start to strip off his other glove. “Don’t touch it with your bare skin, whatever you do. That original creator, whomever they were, wasn’t to be trifled with if their holocron merited being stored in the temple. If the gatekeeper in it believes you to be unworthy, the hieroglyphics could react in a curse seal. And Sith curses aren’t by any measure _light_ ,” Sariss is careful to add, plucking the holocron out of his hands before placing it back in the energy shield on the workbench. It levitates to hover in the anti-grav environment once the shields engage, spinning slowly.

 

“Do you have any idea of who the gatekeeper represents in this particular holocron?” 

 

“Considering how many Sith existed a thousand years ago, there could be any number of candidates who constructed this holocron. It’s smaller than average but deceptively so—it was meant to be carried. Some old lords from the Sith Empire preferred monolithic holocrons housed in large pyramids—ones that would take days for slaves to move. The smallest I’ve seen, barring this one, is the size of a holopad. This one can fit into your breast pocket. But none of it makes sense. The blade, the holocron. From the short looks I got at the saberstaff, both of these items come from an earlier era, a clear two thousand years after the temple was abandoned. This planet was just as deserted as it is now as it was a thousand years ago when these items were constructed. Someone would’ve had to have placed them within the temple itself, and recently.” 

 

Silence falls on them as Sariss busies her hands at her workbench. Kylo stares at the scrolling feed of aurebesh as her holopad downloads years of files.

 

Sariss is the first to crack. He hears her tools clatter onto the surface of the workbench as she presses her hands to it, exhaling. “Alright, I take back what I said earlier about not wanting to know. What are you going to do with her?”

 

He answers Sariss with silence, because he is just as adrift about the decision. 

 

“Can I speak freely?” Sariss starts, scrubbing a hand through her short hair.

 

“When have you ever not spoken your mind?” he asks her, turning. She’s facing him now, leaning against the workbench with her arms folded tight across her chest. He remembers how she looked during his first years with the order, her face not-so-brittle and free of its present tension. A passive, calm lake in the middle of the roiling turmoil the knights embodied. 

 

Sariss purses her lips and looks like she’s in danger of rolling her eyes, but she refrains. “You _can’t_ kill her,” she emphasizes her words by stabbing a finger at him as she paces, putting the workbench between them. “We were all like her at one point. Lashing out at everything that moved, in one form or another. Whatever the gatekeeper in this holocron saw in your apprentice was something worthy of survival. I don’t believe in killing something worthy of training—it would be a waste of your potential as a teacher and hers as a student.”

 

“Tremayne might be right,” he warns. Sariss scoffs. 

 

“Tremayne is an overcautious relic. The girl needs proper guidance. _Your_ guidance. She’s been alone for so long that dependency on others will be as rankling as a slave collar. But with time, she might learn how far she can go—how much her powers can do to restore order to the galaxy. You didn’t believe in our cause overnight—give her that chance,” Sariss is entreating at this point, arranging her tools around the holocron in a furtive attempt to keep her hands busy. She looks up at him.

 

“You, her, the others—this generation is my hope for the future. Even the Supreme Leader acknowledges his own mortality by passing on his teachings to you. Him, Tremayne, myself, Yun—we’re all fading shadows. The day will come when the First Order requires a guiding hand to lead all of us into the age of the resurgent Empire, Kylo Ren. You’ll meet opposition from without and from within—people like Hux and the moffs have no respect for our kind. Fear, but little respect. You and her must aspire to the levels that the Supreme Commander reached during his era—symbols. Gods. _Leaders_ ,” she grits out, pressing a palm against the table. 

 

“I’ll take what you’ve said into consideration,” he says, his tone cautious because what Sariss is insinuating is something dangerous—something spoken between the lines of all knights when the conversation turns towards the ambiguous future, uncertain as their fate is at this time. Sariss’s open expression shutters closed once more, the cut on her cheek flexing under the strain of her frown.

 

Sariss turns her back to him, her shoulders rigid as she deactivates the shielding around the holocron works a clean brush into the grooves of the holocron’s sides.

 

Her next words are spoken absently, as if she is saying them more for herself than for him. “Some believe a military junta is required to lead the First Order—not the guidance the Supreme Leader provides. It’s our mission to root out such dissension and elevate those that put the mission before their personal ambitions. And that girl is someone I foresee as a great ally if you win her trust. You don’t get a better omen than some stripling girl wielding an ancient blade, carrying a powerful holocron over the body of the massive terentatek she just mauled.”

 

* * *

 

She surfaces, finally. Jumbled dreams of a masked trio hovering over her, droids phasing in and out of her line of sight. “ _Powerful_ ,” says a woman’s voice. The sharp edges of the masked man’s mind— _Kylo—_ another, blunt edges and linked with the woman. They’re watching.

 

Rey breaks out of the fog slowly, her eyes opening on a bland ceiling with equally bland lighting in a sterile room. Lines are fed into ports on both insides of her elbows. Every inch of her is bolted down to this table. A tiny wriggle assures her that she’s stuck full of needles and tubes. Rey sucks in a calming breath and exhales, feeling something brush gently against her mind. Her neck and head are the only parts of her she has freedom of movement over, so she turns in the direction of a blur sitting on the edge of her bed.

 

It’s him. Without the mask—she remembers now. Him and two others, all masked until the woman removed hers. Her need to break everything in the room to escape, to be free. She had to get out of here, this was a _mistake, her being here is a mistake—_

 

 _Kylo—_ that is his name—interrupts her. His voice is smooth, undulating waves. She settles and scrapes her chin against the sheets, clearing the loose hanks of hair out of her eyes to watch him warily. “If you remain calm, I’ll remove the restraints. If you act out again, they will remain on your limbs until you prove that you can keep your emotions in check.”

 

Rey only manages to tip her head in a nod— _yes_. She feels his hands work slowly at her restraints, the crinkle of the cheap fabric of her medical tunic filling her ears as he feeds the wires and tubes back out of her skin. He carefully smears bacta patches over the sluggishly leaking punctures the needles and wires have left in her, spotting her white with pasted bandages until she lies free of all the machines on the bed.

 

“Will you listen to what I have to say, Rey?” he asks her, sotto voiced—as if he’s trusting her with a great secret. It’s the first time he’s used her given name. Not _girl_ or _scavenger_. Her breath catches in her chest. She reaches for that dark spot in her mind that she knows the woman lives in. The ghost offers no wise words of guidance, but Rey can feel her like a pressure behind her eyes if she lies still enough. 

 

“I’m listening,” she croaks, her voice rough with disuse and her throat raw from screaming.

 

“My master has given me a choice—either I let you live and bring you up as a knight of our order, or you die by my hand on this backwater. What should my option be?” he asks her, as if she has a hand in her own fate. The part of her that is _survival_ screams at her to listen carefully.

 

But her mouth wins out. “You’re all insane,” she mutters to the ceiling overhead, seeing through him. He doesn’t reply. Minutes pass and his face remains a smooth, passionless mask as he watches her start to crumble. She thinks of everyone in Niima, their bones already scoured clean by the star’s rays and the beasts and the sand and _she can’t die, she has to go back_. Fay’et’s body, slowly consumed. Thrash’s vertebrae snapping with a twist of her wrist. 

 

Rey has always understood who holds power over her. Unkar Plutt. The elements. Starvation. Heat. Waiting.

 

Now it’s this man. 

 

Rey _bends_.

 

“I don’t want to die,” she chokes out, tears beading down her cheeks as she eases her sore body into a bent position. But she’s finally upright. She will not die on her back.

 

“You don’t have to die,” he tells her, offering out a gloved hand. Rey ignores it.

 

“I’m not left with much choice,” she works out between hiccups of short, painful inhales. Her legs swing out over the opposite side of the bed, recoiling away from him even though she feels like an automaton strung along by his words. There’s a hole forming in her chest. She can’t tell if it’s everything in her finally snapping under the strain—is she finally going mad?

 

Kylo stands, backing off a pace or two. The room is empty of droids and other people. It’s just them. “Your training begins as soon as you’re strong enough to step out of this bed.”

 

Rey’s feet press against the cool tile of the medbay. 

 

She stands.

 

 

 

**End of Act I: The Abduction**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A nice long chapter! For once, I have only a few references to give you since everything has been covered in earlier chapters.
> 
> ['Jerec'](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jerec) was leader of Sarris and Yun's old group, a cadre of Force users known as the seven Dark Jedi. Jerec's former master during his time with the Jedi Order was the Jedi archeologist and archivist [Jocasta Nu](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jocasta_Nu/Legends).
> 
> [The _Vengeance_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vengeance_\(Vengeance-class\)) is a slender, sword-like KDY Super Star Destroyer.
> 
> Those familiar with my other fic _Forms_ should be well aware of the pair that co-command the Vengeance in my 'verse' as it is.
> 
> As always: Sariss, Yun, and Tremayne remain characters of the EU. Minor edits have been done on act one since I re-read 'Rey's Survival Guide' and had to tweak some tiny lines about certain aspects of living on Jakku.
> 
> Otherwise, put on the training montage, folk. THE FUCKENING HAS JUST BEGUN.


	6. ACT II: The Adherent, Part I

**ACT II: The Adherent, Part I**

 

 **T** he man—Kylo—gives Rey privacy long enough for her to struggle into fresh clothes provided by the 2-1B after he lets the droids back into the medbay. She struggles into the clothes and observes a small army of mouse droids cleaning up the wreckage of a window nearby, while the medical droids pick up supplies and instruments strewn across the floor. _Did I do that?_

 

Rey contemplates that it’d be suicide to attempt an escape out of the broken window, considering what she can make of the distance between this level and the jungle floor far below.

 

Her limbs shake from the effort of standing, the starchy linen of the clothing rubbing at the raw cuts where the medical ports used to be. The soft inners of her elbows, the burning sting at her shoulder—every scrape and puncture feels magnified as the analgesic drugs thin out in her blood. There’s nothing to be done about her free-hanging, tangled rat’s nest of hair for now. She keeps close to the walls and guides herself with a firm hand held flat against the wall and braced under her weight, staggering her steps so that she can slink along with her hand against it. One of the medical droids make some noise about her condition and how ill-advised it is for her to be up and moving at this stage in her recovery, but Rey ignores them and limps out of the open door into the hall beyond.

 

He stands with his back turned towards a viewport that runs the length of the hall. The outward view of the jungle below is dizzyingly panoramic and a faint haze on the horizon suggests either dawn or dusk as the hour. Rey tries to estimate the time that has passed from when Kylo first plucked her up from the jungle floor and when she woke up with most of her senses in the medbay. An estimate comes to mind, fuzzy and vague, but it gives her the impression that she was unconscious only for dusk and the night that followed.

 

Kylo’s face leeches some of the dull light ekking its way through the transparisteel windows. His skin is somewhat sallow, as if it’s rarely exposed to the sun’s rays and remains hidden by the helm most of the time. On Jakku she’d only seen human off-worlders with that particular cast to their skin—those that came from planets where the sun wasn’t beating down constantly, where they had the luxury of cloud cover and a roof over their heads most of the time.

 

“Thank you,” she says after an awkward exchange of her staring fixedly at his face and him returning the stare tenfold. For what, Rey can’t quite put her finger on. The reason for why she’s thanking him is nebulous—bringing her back to the relative safety of the compound for medical treatment, allowing her to live, or the simplicity of putting clothes on her back. In spite of whatever scrap of gratitude she might feel for the person that single-handedly broke apart the base elements of her existence as if they were building blocks, Rey remains painfully aware of the reality of being indebted to a person that holds power over her. And of being bound by an ultimatum.

 

 _Do as they say or die_ , she rationalizes, reminding herself that he’s more than one. He’s one of many.

 

“Your room,” Kylo says as a way of breaking the silence that stretches between them, motioning down the long hallway as a signal for her to go on ahead of him. Rey nods, stumbling with her hand pressed to the wall and the other outstretched for balance. It’s an unnerving feeling to have her back exposed to him. It raises the hairs along the nape of her neck, the weight of his stare a real thing. This continues for about ten agonizing steps until she hears a sigh of exasperation behind her, then her sense of balance is lost by the jarring sensation of being plucked up like a discarded bit of scrap in the sand.

 

“Stop wriggling. All you’re doing is aggravating your wounds,” he lectures, arranging her weight across his arms as he tucks her up against his chest. All of this is done without breaking his stride. The man doesn’t know how to walk slow, apparently. He seems to know only two speeds—sprint and a particularly long-gaited way of stalking towards his goal.  

 

“This is starting to become a habit,” Rey notes, gritting her teeth against the lancing sting in her shoulder and the various pains she doesn’t want to catalog as she folds her arms across her chest. It’s the only place to put them. Definitely _not_ around his neck.

 

“What?” he asks her, his tone distracted as he pauses at an intersection of corridors. He takes a left. Rey makes a note in her mind, already keenly mapping out the route from the medbay like she would if she was in the vast belly of a destroyer on a scavenging trip. Orientating herself with her surroundings gives her a sense of control she’s sorely lacking at the moment.

 

“You, me—the carrying. Though this time I’m _conscious_ and able to walk by myself,” she insists, stubbornness laced in her tone as she tries to struggle out of his grip and back to the ground. The movement jostles her shoulder and she seizes, hissing out as the dull pain throbs bone-deep.

 

“You’re being impractical. It’d take an age for you to walk down to the living quarters—all to save your pride.” The lecturing in his tone has doubled, underlining the stressed vowels and tightening frustration in his posture. He’s obviously not accustomed to someone disobeying his orders.

 

Rey subsides in her struggles, deciding to pick her battles when she knows there’s a slim chance of winning. In this case there’s no way he’s setting her down until they arrive at whatever closet he’s putting her in.

 

Another left turn brings them to a short hallway. She counts six plain doors placed three and three on either side of the hall with key code panels set into their thresholds. They all have a single aurebesh placard affixed to them—Kylo finally sets her down at the third and last door on the left. The placard here reads _Esk_ , the fifth letter in the alphabet. Rey leans up against the wall beside the door while Kylo strips one glove free, pressing the heel of his palm into the keypad’s interface grid. It lets out a beep and the door slides open with a soft _hiss_.

 

Biometrically locked to his handprint. Rey knew then that her nascent escape plan was acquiring more setbacks by the minute. He looks at her head-on, motioning her into the room. “Don’t move around too quickly. You’re coming off of heavy drugs,” he warns. Rey shrugs off the concern and walks in.

 

She notices then that he’s refusing to give her his back or walk ahead of her. While he may be unmasked now, he’s not putting himself in any position of vulnerability.

 

 _Smart_.

 

“This is a bit bigger than the last closet you put me in,” she notes after limping into the room. It’s about as big as her bolthole on Jakku, the repurposed troop compartment in _Hellhound Two_. This room is similarly furnished for the sake of practicality like her old home. The difference is that there’s an actual free-standing bed set along the back wall instead of a hammock and a desk with a chair that aren’t scrapped together from sheets of metal sitting in one corner. All of the furniture in the room is done in utilitarian grey, but is new and whole.

 

A sliding door to the right of the bed opens into an honest to stars _‘fresher_ with a toilet, sink, and shower stall. Rey ducks her head into there for a quick look before glancing under the bed—that space is occupied with storage compartments built into the bedstead. They’re opened to reveal neatly folded stacks of clothing—copies of the fresh training blacks and undergarments she’s wearing now. Even a few spare pairs of boots and soft-soled shoes are tucked next to them.

 

Rey struggles to make it over to the narrow viewport set into the wall on the left. It stretches up from the floor, about as tall and wide as she is and speckled with moisture on the outside pane.

 

She turns to see Kylo watching her from the doorway, his arms folded across his chest with one shoulder leaned into the threshold. There’s a very faint look of amusement in his eyes.

 

“You get upgraded in accommodations after enduring that hellhole for a standard week. Consider it a promotion.”

 

It takes her a moment to register that he’s attempting some sort of humor. He’s mastered quite the deadpan expression on delivery.

 

The world outside her narrow window is a maze of trees interrupted only by the faint outline of rusting lightning spires. She can tell this level is set high into the cliff from the dizzying sight of how far below the jungle floor is from her window. From the number of doors they’ve passed it’s apparent that the complex is a vast warren of chambers and rooms. A faint sense of vertigo overwhelms her. Rey catches herself on the viewport’s frame and forces herself to breathe.

 

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she quavers, spinning on her heel with the agility and speed brought on by the sudden overwhelming urge to vomit.

 

“I warned you. You’re going to be ill,” he assures her, nodding from his spot in the doorway. _Ass_.

 

Rey doesn’t know how she ended up kneeling in the ‘fresher so quickly, but she doesn’t question it. She barely flips the lid on the toilet quick enough before the retching starts.

 

After a minute of straining over the lip of the toilet, losing whatever was left in her stomach, she realizes that the door to the hall has shut and Kylo has given her some degree of privacy by leaving. Rey presses her brow into the cool metal of the toilet seat.

 

“Thank the stars,” she exhales, sagging her body towards the floor. She reaches back to tuck her braid back from falling against her cheek.

 

_Braid?_

 

Rey reaches back again and feels the nape of her neck. Where once her hair hung free and nearly in her face, it’s tied itself back into a sloppy but serviceable knot. It was safely away from her face and the threat of getting sick all over it. Her fingers tighten on the lip of the ‘fresher as a convulsion starts again in her gut. But instead of getting sick again, it’s pure, unadulterated laughter that bubbles up from her throat. Rey presses her clammy brow to the cool metal of the ‘fresher and loses herself in the moment.

 

Misappropriation of this _Force_ on his part, it seems. But she’s grateful for it.

 

* * *

 

A protocol droid delivers a tray the next morning along with what it describes as a packet of vitamins and low-grade painkillers. Rey washes them down with the cup of water she draws from the sink, turning the faucet on and off a few times to watch the miraculous trickle of water swirl down the drain. Her own water on tap. The rest of the day passes in relative peace. There’s nothing in the room but the furniture and her clothes, some toiletries that she spends an hour examining before trying them out. It’s a luxury to stand under the hot spray in the shower stall, washing off the smell of the medbay and cleaning the pink scars crisscrossing her hands and shoulder with a flannel. The bacta has gotten her neatly patched up.

 

Once she dries off and redresses herself, she measures the width and length of her room. Rey has nothing to scratch the days off on the wall with, so she ties knots in a spare length of boot string to number the days since she’s been off Jakku. Eleven standard galactic days, by her estimate, but it could be off by a day or two considering her grasp on time was tenuous so soon after waking up.

 

Rey tries to ignore how the feeling of confinement is closing in on her. At least back home she could go outside of the _Hellhound Two_ whenever she wanted and walk the perimeter of her property in the dead of night when sleep eluded her, or go out to the Starship Graveyard during the daylight hours to keep her mind and hands occupied with scavenging. Jakku might not have been a choice of hers to begin with, but it became her choice over a period of adaptation. The drive to survive on that rock had one purpose for her—to wait. To wait for the people that had left her to finally come back.

 

But no one returned.

 

Faint daylight from the cloud cover gradually lessens and night falls, turning the narrow view she has of the world outside of her room into a darkness illuminated only by lightning striking the spires. The rumbling and cracking of the super hot matter coming down from the clouds becomes less frightening and more comforting to her, like the ticking of a chrono.

 

Rey finally abandons the vigil she’s been holding by the window after the last protocol droid delivered a tray for dinner and collected the cleaned off one from breakfast. She’s tempted to make a break for it, just shove the droid out of the way. It can’t be too terribly strong. But the prospect of getting lost in the vast complex is daunting. Rey needs time to figure out the layout before attempting that; supplies, a comm-link, more than enough rations to last her. These are the things she will need to hoard before attempting anything resembling an escape into the jungle. Then what?

 

Questions fill her mind as she strips out of her training blacks she donned for the day, slipping between the sheets with her undergarments on as a serviceable form of sleepwear.

 

About midway into the night she hears it. It’s loud enough to wake her up.

 

 _Tck. Tck-tckkkkk. Tck. Tck._ Like the rapping of a piece of metal on metal. Rey cautiously raises up from the mattress, twisting her arm out to touch the switch to bring the bright lights of her room online. They fail to activate.

 

“You don’t need the light, dearest. Not to see me, such a familiar face it is,” drawls a voice from the corner where the desk is situated.

 

It feels like something is perched on her chest—breathing is difficult, her limbs leaden. Rey cannot even raise herself up under this invisible weight she feels pressing down on her chest, so her eyes fix so hard on the corner that she sees spots. Her thoughts begin to race and she can feel her pulse jump in her throat. There’s not enough ambient light from the night outside of her window to even give her an idea of the shape sitting there.

 

A flash of lightning illuminates the corner.

 

It’s the Sith. The hood of her robe is thrown back and she has one leg cocked over the other. The sound of metal comes from her nails scraping at the arms of the chair. Her gaze is fixed on Rey, veins etched in the pale skin of her face as clearly as the ink bisecting her strange eyes. Just as quickly as the lightning flashes, the corner is thrown back into darkness and all that indicates there’s something there is the scraping sound.

 

_Tck. Tk-tckkkkk._

 

“I thought they had the stone locked up somewhere,” Rey manages to grit out. It feels like someone has dropped a speeder onto her. The weight is crushing. A faint ringing is in her ears and a real sense of panic starts in her gut.

 

“The holocron? I’m not bound by such a thing. Not anymore.”

 

Rey has a million questions. _What are you, why are you here, why me, why can’t I move—_

 

Her thoughts are interrupted by the Sith’s full-throated chuckle. Rey hears her stretch her legs out, the folds of her robes crinkling like sheets of foil. “So many questions, so little time. By the way, this is _our_ little secret. These visits will become more frequent, the more you learn. I imagine these people are going to gloss over many valuable lessons in the interest of keeping you ignorant, if it’s not their own ignorance of the facts keeping them from imparting the knowledge to you. So much has been lost…I can barely begin to imagine how much has been forgotten in this last millennia alone.”

 

“I don’t believe you are what you say you are,” Rey stumbles on the words, her eyes heavy and her tongue leaden. The Sith lets out a soft _tsk_ ’ing sound before the clicking of boots against the floor rings out. She’s coming closer. Rey feels the sweat break out along her back and neck, dampening her sheets.

 

“This is a dream. Dreaming,” Rey squeezes her eyes shut and chants into her pillow, trying to even out her breathing. Her heart races and she feels the brush of soft, fine hair tickle her nose before the thick scent of ozone and blood fills her nostrils.

 

“Astute of you to notice. Lesson number one, Rey. Don’t believe everything your eyes tell you,” the Sith speaks into her ear.

 

Rey starts. She’s lying supine on the bed. A ceiling is overhead. The room is dark and the chair at her desk is empty. Rain is pattering on her window and there’s a soft rumble of thunder off in the distance after a lightning flash illuminates every corner of the room for a split-second. There’s no one.

 

“Keep it together,” she mumbles into her hands, turning over onto her side in an attempt to curl in on herself. Her body is shaking and it doesn’t subside until she wraps the blankets tighter around herself. It’s colder in the room than she’s used to. Even the year-round temperatures of Jakku’s nights were warmer than this compound.  

 

The next morning doesn’t transpire like the one before it. She snatches a few fitful hours of sleep before dawn, turning on her soft bed in an effort to find the right position where everything will miraculously fall into place to where she sleeps like the dead. Eventually she gives up and settles for the sporadic stretches of sleep interrupted by waking dreams of reptilian eyes and crackles of bright lightning dancing across her fingertips.

 

All of that is shot to kriff when her bedstead is upended and she’s sent rolling onto the floor like a sack of junk in the middle of a fitful bout of sleep.

 

“UP AND AT ‘EM, SANDWEED!” a reverberating, metallic voice echoes. It’s similar to Kylo’s and issued from a vocoder. Rey has her back against the wall and her hands raised into fists in front of her before she can even begin to fully wake up.

 

Standing on the other side of her—now righted—bed is the most massive male of any humanoid she’s seen, dressed like Kylo in dark robes and with a metal helm hiding his features. His limbs are as thick as support pylons and the room seems smaller with him in it. Rey gapes for a half second before she reaches for something, _anything_ to use as a weapon. Maybe she could jiggle a cabinet free and throw it at him?

 

The man could square up with a Wookiee at eye-level and might have a fighting chance of escaping the brawl with most of his limbs intact. The door was open. It’d be more ideal to attempt with actual clothes on her instead of just undergarments, but her options were narrowing.

 

“Peace, scrapper. I’m here to collect you. You have the honor of being indoctrinated into the next chapter of your life by,” he sketches a tiny bow of his head, “Yun. Get clothes. You’ll catch your death running around these halls in your skivvies. You need to sleep lighter. Could’ve killed you where you lay. Vigilance goes a long way. For all you know there could be a slew of people in this complex ready to see you dead.”

 

Rey doesn’t have time to protest. She barely has time to grab clothes out of the compartment before a force of some kind is dragging her headlong into the hall behind the man calling himself Yun.

 

“This is entirely unnecessary!” she shouts, slightly outraged and more than a little peeved. The force dragging her along stops as the man pauses to glance back at her.

 

“What was that, dunerat?” Yun says over his shoulder.

 

“Rey, my name is _Rey_ ,” she enunciates slowly as she scrambles into the training blacks she snatched from the compartment before the strange force started dragging her from her room. Trying to keep pace with him is nearly impossible. She ends up getting one foot into her pants and steps into her boot before she’s jogging to catch up, holding up the other side of her pants with a hand already laden with her other boot. The shirt was easy enough to get around her neck, so that goes on last once she covers her lower half decently. By then she’s lost her sense of direction, and has no idea where he’s lead her to down the many halls in the complex. They end up in a large training area a few minutes after they set out from her room.

 

“Stranger and stranger,” she mutters under her breath, glancing around the cavernous sparring area. There’s weapon racks lining the walls and stacks of training mats. She recognizes battle droids deactivated in the corner along with a few striking dummies. It’s a well maintained room that looks like it sees a lot of use. Not a speck of dust that she can see.

 

“Word is that you’re crafty with this stick,” Yun says over the clang of metal. He’s over at one of the racks. He frees one weapon from the rack and holds it aloft. The sight of it makes Rey start forward, a noise of surprise coming from her. But she pauses as soon as she sees Yun replace it in the pressure clamps. Her quarterstaff is once more locked onto the rack with the other various instruments of death.

 

“Commander Ren had it shipped with a few other supplies from the _Finalizer_. They deploy supply probes to us whenever they’re idling in a nearby system. Said you might be more comfortable starting out with a weapon you knew,” Yun explains, shrugging out of his outer-robes to reveal the dull, dark armor beneath. His helm stays on.

 

“Right, _basics_ ,” Yun claps his hands together, moving closer to her. The sound rings in Rey’s ears and she feels her shoulders bunch up. “You’ve got some groundwork laid out for basic combat. But MY job,” he points a thumb at his chest, “is to instruct you on the forms.”

 

“Forms?” Rey asks.

 

“We’ll get to those. For now, how are you with scrapping?”

 

“I haven’t—” she starts, but the faint feeling of something coming at her with the speed of a blaster bolt halts that line of questioning.

 

She barely ducks the hook he throws at her skull from the left. Rey comes up from her dive to the floor and tries to land a blow as squarely as she can on the unarmored stretch near the base of his neck. She scores it, but her knuckles split from the force and Yun is barely moved back a step.

 

Yun scoffs, “C’mon, hit me like you mean it. I’ve met Ugnaughts with more power to their punches. You’re now _Ugnaught_ until you can hit harder.”

 

Yun, she comes to discover, is both gregarious and a harsh teacher.

 

* * *

 

The next instructor she meets after the medbay droid—who patches up Yun’s _gifts_ of contusions and scrapes—reminds her faintly of the Sith. Yun leads her to a hololibrary no bigger than her own room, the door _whooshing_ open to reveal a robed woman waiting for them. Rey’s perception of the her washes away when the she illustrates a softer mannerism towards her that doesn’t reek of ill-intentions. Not at face value, at least.

 

Her name is Sariss. Just Sariss, like Yun. Rey remembers her face faintly from her earlier incident in the medbay.

 

Databanks flash under a thin layer of dust and cobwebs. A nearby workbench has a set of chairs tucked at opposite ends. Once Yun makes the introductions, he shuts the door and leaves the two women to their own devices.

 

Sariss keeps her mask in place and her robes tightly drawn around her, the cut of them more scholarly than Yun’s loose ones with heavy armor lain over them. They remind Rey of the priestly robes she saw on pilgrims in Niima who stopped in for repairs one month.

 

“You’re a quick study,” Sariss notes after hours of going over the basics with Rey. A lot of the history she’s imparted so far has been events that Rey has learned through a serious oral tradition of gossip and tale-spinning at Niima. Old Traz was fond of tales from the bygone eras of the Old Republic and beyond. Sometimes people from the Sacred Villages would venture out for supplies and pass on a tale at Old Meru’s that Rey would hear second-hand. The glitchy terminal back in her bolthole had a few military texts that filled in what word of mouth didn’t provide and gave her a rudimentary education on things beyond maths and writing.

 

Every question Rey has thrown at Sariss thus far has gone answered, so she teases out one that has yet to have been answered by any spacer she’s spoken with on Jakku: the questions that she has yet to find in any remnant of the downed starship terminals.

 

“How was the Empire any better than the Old Republic?” Rey asks, scrolling through the endless categories on politics.

 

“The imposition of the law didn’t work with the Old Republic,” she says, glancing up at the overhead lamp glaring down on them. “Up until the implementation of the Grand Army of the Republic, it had no standing military to enforce the sanctions. They tried to impose on systems that violated the laws set down in its constitution. It was weak, unable to concede that a centralized form of government and strong military is the only way to maintain _order_ in the galaxy.” Sariss punctuates this by penning in a search on her own holopad, transmitting a file to Rey’s. It’s an old vid of the Imperial Navy in its full glory. She’s never gotten a clear, whole, _working_ vid on her terminal back on Jakku. Rey watches transfixed as a Super Star Destroyer moves like a leviathan through the darkness of space, the camera panning out to the smaller Star Destroyers flanking her.

 

“When Emperor Palpatine reformed the Old Republic into the Galactic Empire, there was a centralization of government and a consolidation of power.” Sariss sounds very much like she’s said this a million times before. “The New Republic’s senate has debated on this basic concept Palpatine established with the Galactic Empire—should they have more government involvement in their home systems or less? Two factions exist now in the New Republic’s senate.” She leans across the table to flick the holopad screen in Rey’s lap with her stylus. It brings up a vid of a vast room filled with more people than Rey’s seen in her life. There are vidcams hovering over the orderly crowd, recording the events as an older woman addresses the vast congregation in strong, reverberating tones. “The Centrist worlds believe in a single galactic government and a large standing army, not unlike the old Empire. The Populists believe in governing themselves and insist that each planet retain its own sovereignty.”

 

“How much does the New Republic know about the First Order?” Rey asks, regretting the question as soon as it’s out of her mouth. She’s dabbling in dangerous intelligence. Then again, the entire situation itself reeks of danger. Rey knows she might not make it out of this alive if she plays her hand sloppily around these people.

 

“They know of us. But they fail to consider us a threat. There are a few who aren’t as convinced as the majority, though. A splinter faction has formed in the recent years, calling itself the Resistance. A sort of rebellion unto itself that rejects the stance that the New Republic holds towards the First Order, believing they should be more proactive in working against us.” Sariss tosses up her stylus with a flick of her fingers. The instrument hangs suspended in the air over the workbench and begins to spin like a small satellite around the overhead light at the woman’s beckoning motions. “Even though the Resistance is an annoyance, the New Republic believe us to be a shattered Imperial remnant that poses no real threat to their government.”

 

Rey’s being let in on a great secret that she wants no part of. She shifts uncomfortably in her chair, setting her stylus and holopad down on the workbench. The hours of talking have lulled Rey into almost forgetting the facts: these are her people now, despite her feelings on the matter. Her people until she can find a way off of this kriffing rock. Sariss has her mask pointed straight at her and Rey knows the woman is watching her every move, possibly hearing her every thought. She tries to empty the thoughts out.

 

“Just remember that the information you have now—doubled with the fact that you’ll be privy to more as you progress in your training and widen your role in the First Order—is information that will get you killed if you divulge it to anyone on the outside, ” Sariss explains, spinning her stylus around in the air with a lazy waving of her fingers, “Indeed, anyone outside of the _knights_ I would go as far to say. We don’t suffer a traitor long, Rey.”

 

* * *

 

Sariss is smoking a cigarette in the galley when Kylo walks in. The woman glares at the burner and the contents of the pan on it as the mystery meat within it sizzles.

 

Kylo knows none of the knights are picky about eating rehydrated rations. But on long hauls like this, it’s best to get fresh meat while you can and pack in the protein. Already he is having trouble keeping weight on even with protein supplements, his body slimming down from the severe downgrade from the _Finalizer’_ s fresh food.

 

“What’s on the menu?” Yun booms over Kylo’s shoulder. His frame fills the doorway and the cramped galley becomes miniscule with two grown men and a tall woman standing between the countertops. A protocol droid brings them meals if there’s work they’re prioritizing, but every once in awhile the three of them find time to sit down at the same table, without a major incident occurring. It’s one of the reasons Kylo favors working with Sariss and Yun—less high drama and theatrics, no great need to grandstand and throw their weight around. They know when to make a statement and when to let things simmer. There’s a degree of respect shared between the three of them.

 

“Sleen,” Sariss bites down on her cigarette to talk without having it fall out of her mouth, her words terse as a result. She scrapes the slabs of translucent meat onto metal plates along with the hydrated vegetables ladled from a pot sitting on another burner. “Think fast.”

 

Kylo barely has time to reach out with the Force to stop the plate from spinning off the edge once Sariss hurls it like a discus at the cramped table nearby. Yun and himself quickly find their seats while Sariss serves herself and Yun portions.

 

“I woke up today thinking to myself you’d hunt down something resembling beef. Instead you nab _lizard,_ again,” Yun complains at Sariss. The chair’s metal legs creak and groan under his weight. Sariss lifts an eyebrow in a peeved expression aimed at Yun, her fingers closing around the stem of her wineglass and she sets his plate down firmer than is necessary.

 

“If you’re so keen on something different, _you_ go out and find something. Swamp wampa, maybe? Nothing but reptiles and amphibians. Not enough mammals to shake a stick at. Would you prefer more rehydrated nerf meat? That’s a firm pass from me, I’m close to becoming a nerf myself if I eat one more piece of that blasted animal.” The woman slid into the last free seat next to Yun before digging in.

 

“Rey eats it, seems to have no arguments towards it. Neither do I,” Kylo interrupts, keeping his eyes on his plate as he saws pieces of the sleen meat into bite-sized bits with his knife and fork.

 

“Rey will eat anything that isn’t rehydrated junk in a bag,” Yun fires back, barking with laughter. Kylo can’t argue—Rey does seem inclined to eat anything fresh the protocol droid puts on her plate versus the rehydrated rations it sometimes gives her. The bigger man pauses in lifting his fork to his mouth. “Speaking of, how is the girl progressing after her first day on the job?”

 

“She struggled adjusting to the technology at first, but she’s proving adept at her studies and caught on quicker than I’ve ever witnessed someone from a low-tech world being introduced to the mainstream lifestyle of the galaxy. She’s got a technical mind and a very clever disposition beneath that stubborn exterior. I understand she’s excelling at her physical training… and that she’s not reaching for the Force as often as you’d like,” Sariss points out, stabbing the air with her knife in Kylo’s direction. He barely glances up. “Exercise whatever measure of patience you possess when you begin to train her, Kylo. Remember how you were for a long time. The path to success is best tempered with an understanding teacher that knows their student’s limitations.” Sariss won’t say it outright, but the connotations are there.

 

More like Skywalker. Less like himself.

 

“I didn’t come to dinner for a lecture,” Kylo reminds her, shoveling food into his mouth with a single-minded determination to finish and get out of the galley as quickly as possible.

 

Sariss blows air out of her nostrils, drawing her shoulders up as she returns her attention to her plate.

 

“The last thing I will say on this is that she’s deceptively resilient. When she started off in the temple all the odds were against her, now look at her. Strongest candidate in years,” Yun says past a mouthful of sleen.

 

Sariss flicks her fingers. The motion she makes shuts Yun’s mouth with a gentle tap of the Force. “Table manners. And that’s the trick to her, isn’t it? I wouldn’t call it a look of innocence, but more of an air of something that even Jakku couldn’t spoil. She may look all round-edged and soft, but it’s a camouflage.”

 

“Jakku, now there’s a backwater shithole if ever there was one,” Yun says. “You think Tatooine is the final word on desert wastelands? Then you visit Jakku. Makes Tatooine look like a tropical resort planet. At least Tatooine has settlements and some kind of administration from the Hutts.” He is careful to swallow before he talks this time.

 

“I don’t know much about it, to be honest,” Kylo admits. “The Supreme Leader gave me the impression that he was looking for something on it or in the area of it when we spoke last.” He starts on his hydrated vegetables. His stomach is not holding the line on his commitment to finishing his plate, but he perseveres.

 

Sariss looks vaguely uncomfortable at the direction of this conversation. Yun takes on her posture like a mirror. Both seem to have remembered something important—Kylo can feel it flickering across both their minds and their bond before they snuff it out.

 

At his questioning look, Yun is the first one to explain. “This is long before you came of age or were even _born_ , commander, but we heard of some of the things that were transpiring on that planet before Rax’s battle took place on Jakku. Most of it was scrubbed from the Imperial archives as a result of fail-safes Palpatine had in place in the event of his death. Trust me, we looked to salvage everything we could out of those databanks after Endor, but we were too slow to do anything about it.” Yun stabs a piece of his sleen onto the tines of his fork. He contemplates it before biting into the flaky meat. “The only one I can think of that might have an idea of what was going on there is—”

 

“She’s still in a communications blackout with the rest of the Third Fleet,” Kylo cuts in. He already knows who Yun is referring to.

 

“All the better to send her a message now and let her chew on it when she does get back on the grid.” Sariss has apparently clued in as well, shoveling her contents of her plate into a limp heap. “If it’s even something you _want_ to be asking around about. It isn’t unheard of to find castoffs on those Mid or Outer Rim worlds. She could be the ruinous bastard of some high ranking noble family from the Core or something along those ordinary lines. What’s it even matter? She’s here now, not there. Her past matters little at this point, just like ours.”

 

That line of reasoning rings with him. The three of them finish their meals in silence and leave the cleanup to the droids.

 

* * *

 

The day after the first of her training sessions, Rey finds herself chasing after Kylo.

 

Or at least, attempting to keep _up_ with Kylo. The man’s two speeds are confirmed to be a brisk walk and full on sprinting. The latter is a preternaturally fast pace that makes her believe the Force is involved in some way. She isn’t about to be outpaced, though, and pushes herself past the point of exhaustion during her first trek outside of the compound since the temple.

 

He had shown up at her door before dawn dressed down in nothing but the training blacks she wears. The sequence of events that followed were filled with the agonizing pain of running long distance through a dense jungle coupled with the threat of rain and dizzying heat pressing on her.

 

“Rey,” he says overhead in the present time. Rey has gotten onto all fours in the jungle and is ready to lay down there and die after ten kilometers at a speed that should’ve made her heart burst out from her chest and keep running ahead of her body.

 

“ _Ugh_ ,” she says with no small measure of disgust for herself. Rey is ready to collapse onto this overgrown path. This jungle has a different kind of heat to it that makes it crueler than Jakku. At least on Jakku it was an arid, dry climate. The humidity levels of Dromund Kaas make her feel like every step is a step deeper into a muggy inferno.

 

“You have a lot to live for,” he says with no small degree of sarcasm. “Sariss has mentioned I had better give you Holonet access. Strictly monitored access, but she seems to think you’d benefit a lot from self-study. My only advice to you is to not believe everything you read on there.”

 

Strangely enough, the prospect of actually having _real_ access to the ‘Net is enough of a motivator to bring her off of the ground and back to her feet. Kylo stands up from his crouch and stares down at her face. She glances from him to the jungle surrounding them, fidgeting with her tunic as she mops the rivulets of sweat off her brow. It’s useless since she keeps sweating rivers in the humid heat.

 

He’s no better off than her, but doesn’t seem to be ready to keel over like she is. The man must be out here every morning doing this.

 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kylo warns her.

 

“What am I thinking?” She decides to humor him.

 

“You might survive on this planet for a few years alone if you find a supply cache. The odds are low that you’d happen upon anyone friendly making a landing here, though.” He shoves back the dark hair hanging in his face. Some of the strands stick up and Rey has to bite her lip hard enough to bleed to keep herself from laughing. “There are superstitions about this system and this planet that keeps most pirates and smugglers far away. If you were to try and smuggle aboard one of our transports that lands here ever so often, you’d be shot on sight before you managed to make it to any compartment to tuck into.” He points off into the jungle as if looking in that direction will indeed illustrate all the fine points he pokes through her current escape plot.

 

Then he turns to start sprinting off in the opposite direction, leaving her alone on the path. “So no, it’s not a smart idea to run off. It’s a very idiotic idea, in fact,” he shouts over his shoulder, already well down the trail at that ridiculous pace again.

 

Rey weighs her odds of survival. She turns from the dark undergrowth of the jungle and chases after Kylo’s retreating form; her hands punch the air in time with her steps. She sucks in lungfuls of mist-laden air as her legs pump like pistons. If she paces herself, she can match his stamina if not his stride.

 

She’s decided today is not the day she breaks free.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A THOUSAND APOLOGIES, DEAR READERS, I LAY MYSELF AT THE MERCY OF EVERYONE WHO READ THIS FIC only to have it put on hiatus for so long. I've returned full force from terrible writer's block and beg for forgiveness. It's a pleasure to be back writing.
> 
> A big thank you to **Ohtze** and **ricca_riot** for beta reading and the wonderful edits they suggested for this chapter, and for **ashesforfoxes** giving this a read before it was published. I owe y'all a lot for helping me get through this writer's block. 
> 
> Ja'ak is going to be updated about twice a month if not three times a month, projected length of about thirty chapters. I intend on wrapping up before Episode VIII drops at the end of this year. Read on!


	7. ACT II: The Adherent, Part II

**Act II: The Adherent, Part II**

 

 **Two standard months later...**  

 **R** ey’s computer terminal blinks. An incoming message scrawls across the top of the screen in aurebesh. She glances up from the holopad in her lap long enough to squint at the text from where she’s seated across the room.

_Training room in five._

It bears no signature. The message is brief and displays none of the unwanted nicknames Yun insists on using. Sariss typically signs her messages with an - _S_ tagged onto the end.

That left Kylo.

Sure enough, right after she skims the message the door to her room slides open. Rey sets down her data pad and toes off her soft-soled shoes, lacing into her sturdier training boots. If she doesn’t set out now, one of them will be sent to fetch her. None of them would be happy about it, least of all Kylo.

His temper had revealed itself to her the previous week; Rey was witness to the aftermath. A couple of maintenance droids were welding a door in one of the corridors near the hololibrary as a result, long swipes of carbon-scoring burned deep into the edges of the ragged remains. Whatever had hacked at it had been strong enough to cleave through the metal to the other side. She could glimpse a cavernous room beyond the door as the droids tilted and moved it during their repairs.

“What did the door do to deserve that?” Rey had demanded, trying to keep up with Sariss. It seemed everyone in the Knights of Ren had mastered that particular quick-stepping gait.

“It was the first thing in the commander’s way after an unsatisfactory comm from our master, I’d imagine,” Sariss mused. Rey didn’t ask about the door further.

The freedom she’d been granted had increased dramatically in the past few weeks. The mandatory escorts had trickled down to only a few occasions, after Rey displayed a disinclination to cause trouble in the complex or mount an escape attempt.

Hurrying to avoid Kylo’s ire, Rey dodges a mouse droid on her way down the corridor. Two lefts and then a right; there’s nothing but long, featureless grey walls and floors as she moves along the route to the training room.

Idly, she wonders again about the possibilities of escape. The halls are patrolled by security droids and every room has scanners to monitor their movement, small, innocuous panels glowing a dull red. All the base’s supplies are locked away behind key coded doors in durasteel crates—Yun told her as much, probably to put her further off from the idea of running.

Her schemes had not gone unnoticed. During her earliest days in the complex, she’d gotten lost in daydreams of escape. Unimpressed, her three guards had shot her pointed looks or plainly told her that escape was impossible. Rey had since learned to push the thoughts out of her head, making it appear as if day by day her will to escape waned. It was hard, clearing her mind of all unwanted thoughts. She knelt in her room for long, fruitless hours of meditation, struggling to clear the surface of her mind and replace those dreams of escape with more convincing constructions: training, something she saw on the ’Net, reciting lessons from Sariss. The trick was to hide the dreams of freedom behind a facade of what they taught her.

During these past few months, she fills her time away from training with thoughts of plotting a course back to the Western Reaches. She needs to find a new method of surviving since Niima has been effectively scrubbed off the face of Jakku. There are a few nearby Sacred Villages she might beg for shelter at, building a relationship with the people within and possibly find a comfortable place for herself to keep waiting. This is all a pipe dream, though, until she finds a way off of Dromund Kaas.

Rey makes the final turn into the training room, precisely five minutes after the message was sent.

Kylo is waiting for her in the center of the training square. His mask is absent and he’s dressed to mirror her in training blacks, the material straining around his biceps. Under the glare of the overhead lights, his eyes are thrown into shadow. He stands straight and erect as ever, his hands behind his back and his feet planted. His features are indistinct in the bright light—the black of his hair bleeds into the black of his clothes and he looms like a specter, his edges sharp and dangerous.

The borders of the training square are laser-etched into the metal flooring, outlining the space she’s allowed to operate within during drills.

“ _Her world,_ ” she bitterly remembers Yun calling it.

As she enters the training room, she pushes the thoughts of escape away once more. Thus far none of her trainers have brought up the change in her thinking, but Rey has sharpened her perceptions. She knows when they are peering into her head now. Sariss and Yun seem satisfied with their surface glimpses, but Kylo is keen.

A month of Kylo’s brutal conditioning nearly put Rey in an early grave. Twenty kilometer runs in sweltering temperatures. Balancing for hours on her hands in the pouring rain. Rey recently graduated to harder combat forms. The commander took it upon himself to show her the ways of the Force—in broad strokes only. Daily, Kylo proves to be a relentless instructor with little patience for her slip ups—Rey pushes herself past the point of exhaustion during the six hours a day she spends with him.

Pausing at the edge of the training square, Rey’s hackles rise as Kylo shifts his weight and unclips the hilt of his saber from his belt.

“I thought we were using training blades again.”

The question hangs in the air for a moment before he looks up from the hilt in his hands.

“Not this time. Get the quarterstaff.” He points at the racks lining the far wall.

She makes sure not to turn her back to him as she moves to collect her staff. It takes her a moment to spot the weapon in the forest of metal facing her. She almost doesn’t recognize it—the sheen of the material has changed since yesterday, the weight all wrong when she hefts it in her hands.

“It’ll get cut in half after the first strike,” she argues, irritated by the sudden change in weight. The staff is lighter than farium has any right to be. She would know—she’s been lugging it around for so many years after salvaging it from the _Ravager_.

“The exterior metal’s been stripped and replaced with phrik. It’ll hold for now.”

Kylo rolls his shoulder, then his neck. The vertebrae _pop_ as he stretches. It’s a habit she’s come to know from their daily sessions in this room.

Phrik, she’s learned, is resistant to lightsaber blades. Sariss has been thorough in instructing her on the most minor of subjects—the history of metallurgy has been the most interesting lesson so far.

“ _You_ modified _my_ weapon?” she asks him, incredulous as she grips the slick surface of the quarterstaff. The new leather grip warms under her palms as she gives the staff an experimental spin. It will take time to adjust, but it’s only a few kilos difference. Hardly the end of the world.

The door at Rey’s back hisses open, cutting off Kylo’s growing look of annoyance and his reply. Sariss and Yun saunter in. Like Kylo, they’ve stopped wearing their masks these last two weeks.

She is having a hard time reconciling the man who ordered the slaughter of everyone at Niima Outpost with the man who now mentors her with a strained kind of patience.

Sariss and Yun are obviously part of the system she is working under. Their level of involvement with the Temple game is still unclear to her, but what is evident is that they served under Kylo in some capacity with the Knights of Ren.

They’re older than she had imagined.

Their years aren’t the wrinkled, weathered kind of age that happen to people on Jakku if they are lucky enough to make it that long, but Sariss and Yun are well past the halfway point of their life expectancy. Yun seems to enjoy the aging process, with his evident smile lines and greying mane of dark hair. Sariss fights time with blonde dyes and cosmetics.

Yun cracks another smile when he sees Kylo’s face. “Y’know, we were going to dabble with paperwork before we heard Rey passing along the corridors. Then we figured, ‘ _well, paperwork is for desk drones and we’ll have a billion of those when we get back to our posting.’_ So, here we are.” He moves to take up a position on one side of training square while Sariss takes the other.

Kylo’s hand tightens on the hilt of his saber. “I told you both to give us privacy.”

It’s the first time they’ve observed one of Rey’s sessions with Kylo. It’s been one-on-one with all of her lessons thus far. Rey ignores the three Knights and sets about her warmup drills in the far corner of the training square. Long, sure thrusts from her shoulders bring the tip of her quarterstaff forward in a deadly strike. Her muscles, always sore these days, protest as she stretches the length of the weapon as far out as she can, holding her footing as she spins into a more complex maneuver.

She rarely gets a chance to do this during sessions with Kylo. Yun lets her run through warm up drills, but Kylo obstinately refuses: his stated logic is that she’ll rarely get a chance to ‘ _warm up’_ in live combat.

“Nonsense!” Sarris says from her side of the training square. “We’re here to provide some much needed moral support to the girl. Besides, you’re a sight when you’re actually trying to teach something.” The older woman winks at Rey, a sly smile stealing across her cool expression.

Kylo’s jaw tightens, like he’s biting his tongue. He pulls a deep breath in through his nose and turns his back on the other Knights.

Rey feels a vibration through the Force—she’s learned to listen to the odd strings of feelings she can gather by reaching out with her mind towards him. Kylo is angry and precise as he focuses on her. Rey spins on her heel as she feels the air move around him, feels the strain in his arms as Kylo lifts the hilt aloft and slides the activation switch.

He doesn’t ask if she’s ready. The only indication that she is about to get hit is the _whoomp_ of his blade powering on before Rey turns to brace the quarterstaff against the blow. The new weight is an advantage—any heavier and she might not have been quick enough to catch the strike. Angry red sparks fly up as his blade grates against the metal, saving her face from being halved like a piece of fruit.

The blow would’ve cleaved her old quarterstaff in half and bisected her along with it.

They fall into a dance perfected over hours of training. Kylo is always on the offensive, pressing, pushing, attacking. The heat of his blade scorches against her fingers when her judgement is anything less than perfect. Rey keeps pace with his breakneck attacks with solid, sure blocks that send the impact reverberating up her shoulders.

Kylo, she’s realized, can start a fight relatively calm, but his anger builds with the tempo of his blows, sharpening into a lethal point as he fights. That’s when his true strength shows. Rey has learned that to match him, she has to flow with him. Following his lead, she releases her frustration, her anger, her rage—the quarterstaff becomes an extension of herself. He shifts as her fury grows and she lands more and more blows against his saber.

On and on they go, spinning and pivoting within the borders of the training square. Sweat pours down her back, into her eyes as she slogs blows against his own. The metallic shriek of the lightsaber’s blade meeting the metal of her quarterstaff rakes sharp fingers across her fraying nerves.

Kylo stops pressing the advantage, falling back and making _her_ initiate attacks with halting, cautious steps. Every move she makes into his reach is met with a jab at her sides, forcing her to overcompensate and block, expending more effort than simple attack patterns.

Rey gets angrier as he swipes at her sides. He’s goading her, trying to make her sloppy. She feigns a jab at his shoulder, using the superior length of her quarterstaff to her advantage. If she can keep out of reach of his blade, all the better.

“Keep pressing, Rey!” shouts Sariss from the sidelines. A distant part of Rey, one that’s not focused on surviving, notices that the woman is prowling back and forth, stalking from one end of the training square to the next. Yun mirrors her movements on the other side, shouting encouragements with a degree more of enthusiasm.

Her lapse in focus is all Kylo needs. Teeth bared in a vicious grin, he slashes down at her. Fire blooms along the length of her leg, and Rey yells, her knees nearly giving out. A bitter tang blossoms on her tongue as she resists the urge to reach for the wound, to grip her leg and crouch down with the dizzying sense of pain. Instead she takes the pain and funnels it into her blows, her face twisting into a snarl. The weapons in the stands around the walls rattle as a tide of power surges through them. Rey growls, pulls at the tearing burn in her leg, and lunges. White knuckled and sweating, Kylo staggers back, driven by her blows.

“And that’s our cue to move back,” Yun shouts over the din echoing through the cavernous room. He acts quickly and pulls Sariss with him by the back of her robes. The training equipment hangs suspended in the air—quivering in time with the blows Rey rains down on Kylo—as they escape into the hall outside. Then a weight rack splinters into metallic shards, embedding lethal splinters where they once stood.

The Force ripples around her, strong with rage and frustration, magnified by the pain burning along her thigh. Rey thrusts out her hand to meet the downward swing of his blade, feeling it scorch her palm before pulse of the Force she sends out repels Kylo back. The push knocks him flat. Training dummies fly against the walls and weapons tumble off of their stands.

Something in her wants carry through—to _end it now_. If she were to clench her fists around the middle of her quarterstaff and angle it down against his throat in a blow, she could crush his windpipe. She would fall to Sariss and Yun, but it would be a victory. A good death. It would be done for all the people who died like beasts under Kylo’s orders back at Niima Outpost. For the hopefuls who died in the temple. For her short-lived friend Fay’et. Even for Thrash. Rey doesn’t want to become the weapon they’re shaping her into.

But as the rage swamps her and she tightens her fingers along the length of her weapon, the urge to kill recedes. Her pulse drops and she takes a deep breath to calm the quaking in her limbs, setting the tip the quarterstaff to the floor with a _clink._ She looks down at Kylo, sprawled on the floor. His expression is unveiled shock. He remembers to power down his blade when it burns into the floor. Sweat beads along his brown and drops with a soft pat.

“That would’ve been a kill if this were a real fight,” Rey hears Yun marvel to his partner in a low, hushed tone out in the hall.

“To me it appeared more like a _duel_ than a training exercise,” Sariss sniffs.

Rey offers out her hand to Kylo, curling her fingers loosely around her quarterstaff. The gesture she offers now is something he’s never done for her—she’s always had to pick herself off the floor. He stares at the fingers that strain towards him, then takes her hand. Rey has always known that he’s larger than her, but to feel how small her fingers becomes in his grip and the heat of his flesh against her palm is unnerving.

Skin-on-skin was a bad idea, Rey realizes. His thoughts amplify in her head from a distant murmur to a full-on roar. Images stream across her mind like a reel of vids, too quick to process. Kylo’s voice is in her head.

_Hasn’t happened since I was—_

Sariss clears her throat. He snaps his hand back and the thoughts fade from her mind. Rey lets her hand fall limply to her side, the murmur of his voice in her made fading once more. It leaves a hollow spot in her mind that she has to gloss with her own thoughts. Kylo opens his mouth, probably to berate the pair, but then the lights overhead spark into absurd, blinding brightness. They flicker once, then fail. The room and the corridor beyond go black.

Rey freezes, her grip tightening on her quarterstaff. The burn on her leg throbs in time with her heart. Of all the people to be stuck in a dark room with, this is her least favorite lineup. Yun’s voice breaks the thick tension after everyone takes a deep breath in and doesn’t let it out.

“This is probably a bad time to mention that I’ve a crushing fear of the dark,” he jokes. Sariss groans. Rey bites back a smile. Kylo scoffs. There’s another weak surge and a whirring sound from far off in the walls as the backup generators come online. The light from the overhead is weak, but it’s infinitely prefered to the claustrophobic darkness of a complete blackout.

The distant rumble of thunder gives Rey a guess as to _what_ knocked the power offline.

Kylo moved in the darkness and has already logged into the mainframe terminal near the door, dialing in a few command lines. Rey sets her quarterstaff back into the clamps on one of the intact weapons racks.

“A lightning strike fried the relay on top of the spire in the southern quadrant,” Kylo tells them after scanning the code his prompt fires back at him. “That’s knocked out our main power grid.”

“Can we live without it?” Yun asks, crouching to lift a metal weight off of a crushed training mannequin.

“Would you call four months without power ‘living’? The generators will last only a day or two. Besides, it’s killed our comm-sat connection. No ’Net.” Kylo logs out of the mainframe terminal with a few taps on the interface and turns to face them.

Sariss looks horrified at the prospect. “Absolutely unacceptable. Top priority fix. The only way I’m surviving out here in this backwater is because of ’Net access.” Rey agrees with her—after living the majority of her life without Holonet access, it will be hard going without.

“So, we fix it,” Rey offers, crossing her arms over her chest. The three of them turn to look at her. Their combined stares make her skin itch, and she shrugs. “What’s the big fuss?”

“This facility was built to run off the power the lightning spires generate. It’s an old Sith Empire network set up long before we ever came here. Think solar, only with violent energy forking down at the spire every couple of minutes,” Yun explains. “We can send droids out, but usually they get fried within a few minutes of attempting repairs on the lightning rods. You ever seen a maintenance droid get fried by a sudden strike of superheated plasma? Fireworks. _Boom_.” Yun makes a fist before blooming his fingers out with the _boom_. “So when this kriffing situation happens, it’s gotta be _manually_ repaired. We have to send ‘troopers up to do maintenance whenever we open this compound up after letting it sit empty for a while. This is the first time I can remember staying long enough to need a repair job done when it’s just us around.”

“Droids will take too long. We halve repair time if two of us work on it,” Kylo says, already heading for the door with a determined, resigned sort of stride. Rey hovers, glancing back and forth between him and the other two. Sariss motions her to follow him with a jerk of her head.

“Go fix it, then—you two have more experience with that tech than us. We’ll stay here and supervise the droids that are going to clean up _this_ ,” Sariss waves vaguely at the mangled mess of equipment and weapons lying in heaps around the back wall. Rey nods, turning to limp after Kylo.

The fact that Sariss labels Kylo as _tech experienced_ surprises Rey—she didn’t know he had any interests besides trying to kill her.

 

* * *

 

An hour later, Rey and Kylo are at the base of the southern lightning spire. After stopping by the medbay to snag a bacta bandage from the 21-B droid, they’d slogged through the mire separating the cliff-side compound from the lower jungle basin. Rey had been given the dubious honor of carrying the tool satchel as she tried to keep up with Kylo through the deluge.

Of course it’s raining—why wouldn’t it be? She tries to ignore the ache in her leg, but it persists despite the bacta.

Pausing, Rey rummages around in the soaked satchel for a length of rope. Wet tendrils of hair have escaped her braid stick to her neck as she blinks raindrops from her eyes. She looks for anything to moor them to the spire once they start working. When she comes up with nothing, she squints at Kylo through the fine mist. “No rope?” she asks. “What if we fall?”

He’s already mounted the spire, but has paused in his ascent to glare down at her. His hair is pulled up into a knot atop his head and he’s is tapping his thumb impatiently against a rung of the ladder.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.” His mouth curls up at the corners. His smile shows teeth, and it isn’t entirely friendly.

Rey doesn’t dignify his question with an answer. She shoots him a sour look and starts climbing after him. “I was asking in the interest of _common sense_ as it seems only logical to have some sort of safety lead. But since you’re so set on getting this done quickly, we’ll just have to skip being sensible and go up without anything to clip us on. In the middle of a lightning storm. On a lightning spire.”

He says something in reply, but the words gets lost as a strike of lightning forks into the jungle about a kilometer away from them. The roar of thunder is deafening and Rey fights back a reflexive cringe.

“What?” she screams in response over the ringing in her ears. Her leg burns as she strains up to hear his reply.

“We’re not going to get hit,” he shouts back.

Rey presses her face into her stretched arm, trying to catch her breath. The blood in her ears is almost as loud as the thunder, and each pulse kindling a new fire in her thigh. The trick is not to panic, but with the sensory overload of climbing a twenty meter spire untethered with a lightning storm raging around her, most of her survival instincts are screaming a resounding “NO” at her. She forces her breath under control and looks back up to Kylo. “What makes you say that?”

He continues moving one hand over the other, climbing the rain-slicked rungs to the top of the spire. She has to follow or she won’t be able to hear him. “I comm’d Yun and had him amp up the draw in the western spire,” he says. “It’ll attract the strikes for a few minutes while we repair this one.” Rey can just see the relay box if she squints.

His reply are the last words they share before reaching the pinnacle. Rey laces her arms tightly under the rung just below the one he’s standing on. He looks even taller from this angle. His clothes are worse for wear. She glances down at herself and sees hers have fared no better. Both of them look like they’ve just done a few laps in a lake and the rain is not letting up.

Kylo pries open the access panel with his fingers, carbon from an earlier electrical fire marking his hands with soot. From the grimace that stretches on his face as he peers into the relay, Rey imagines that it’s not going to be an easy fix.

Kylo proves to be almost pleasant to work with when it comes to repairs. He’s not the most polite of partners, but Rey never expected him to be. He gives her a clear, precise idea of what kind of tool he needs as he observes the problem in front of him. It’s the power converters that’ve gotten scorched and turned into lumps of desh, apparently. Rey hands up appropriate parts and tools before he even asks for them.

“Isn’t it insulated with rubber?” Rey asks, getting rain in her nose for the effort of looking up at him to pose the question.

Kylo squints through the deluge at her, handing her back a servodriver. “There’s always one freak lightning strike that is stronger than the rest. Every time it manages to outdo the others, it bypasses all the rubberized wiring and overloads the circuits.”

“Even the best tech can’t beat the elements, I suppose.” She glances off across the treetops towards the distant spires of lightning. There’s an outline of the old, crumbling capital of this world if she squints. Kaas City.

Kylo’s noise of disgust overhead draws her eyes back up towards him.

“It’s fried the converters to the paneling on the back—hand me that arc welder,” he shouts.

“Are you sure? You might have to laser cut it.” She fumbles for a laser caliper in the satchel.

“We’re both twenty meters airborne without anything strapping us to this spire,” he snarls. “Hand me the damn arc welder.” The spire reverberates as he thumps his hand against it in irritation.

“And who’s brilliant idea was that?” Rey hisses, threading her arms through the support strut to hold herself more firmly to what’s keeping her from become a smear on the jungle floor. Finally she gets his precious arc welder free of the tangle of tools in the satchel. She floats it up to him with a nudge of the Force. He catches it and starts cutting into the wiring, neon sparks peppering his face. Despite the burn, he holds out until he’s cut the fried power converters and thrown them into the canopy below. It’s only a few more minutes until he shuts the panel with an air of finality.

Rey is pleasantly shocked. She couldn’t have done the job swifter herself and is slightly suspicious of his methods—did he bypass a subroutine in the wiring to save time?

“How did you—” she starts.

She feels it before she hears it. She even smells it—the ozonic reek of hot metal and plasma before the lightning strike illuminates every inch of the spire and splits a nearby tree in two. Her fingers go slack in surprise, the bone-deep thrum of accompanying thunder overpowering her senses. The first instinct is to regain her lost grip on the ladder rungs, but her fingers and the metal of the structure are slick from the rain. Her fingers tremble and Rey has the jarring sensation of weightlessness as she begins to fall. She sees Kylo snaps his head in her direction.

Her hands flare out as she tries to compel a push, a pull from the Force—anything to break her fall. The branches come into view within seconds, the rush of air in her hair and the sting of rain on her skin magnified. When her powers fail to respond her short-lived hope of surviving this starts to fall with Rey. Her thoughts focus on a silly realization: at least she’ll die on a green world, even if it is a hellhole.

Then she’s frozen, her sudden plummet halted.

Even the rain around her stops falling. Rey stares upward at the grey stretch of sky above and the outstretched hand Kylo is aiming at her. His face is a mask of fierce concentration, teeth exposed in a grimace as their eyes lock. The tools in the satchel spill out to fall into the canopy far below. There’s a fierce, familiar pull around her midsection and Rey is suddenly hurtling back up the length of the spire. Her face smacks into Kylo’s shoulder and she scrambles to get a purchase around his neck, her nose stinging from the impact.

“Hold onto me,” he rumbles, one hand clamping over her tightly linked arms to make sure she’s got a firm enough grip before beginning the climb down. Her legs lace around his waist to keep them from swinging wildly as he begins to descend. The pulse in his throat thuds against her forearm, his skin feverishly hot.  _Shouldn't have let her come up_ _, handled it myself_. Rey presses her face into the slab of his shoulder and tries to ignore the words filtering through. She tries her best not to choke him at first, the adrenaline gradually ebbing to leave her limbs jellified.

When his feet hit the loamy ground, Rey untangles herself from him to collapse onto it. She gathers bits of dirt and leaves to her, hugging the ground like an old friend. Kylo braces a shoulder against the spire, panting. Their eyes fix on each other for a tremulous few heartbeats. Rey is at a loss for what she needs to offer up: another useless thank you? What was this, the second or _third_ time he’s saved her skin?

But she’s saved by a shrill beeping coming from Kylo’s comm-link.

“ _What’s the status out there? Can we hit the switches or…?_ ” Yun’s voice crackles.

Kylo, still out of breath, throws the comm-link at her. She has to scramble to catch it before it hits her face.

Rey answers for him, practically shouting into the device over the sound of thunder. “Fixed,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HUGE thank you to the superhumans that edited this chapter. It wouldn't be the same without y'all. 
> 
> [ **Ohtze**](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohtze/pseuds/Ohtze), [**ricca_riot**](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot/pseuds/ricca_riot), **[LovelyThings](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyThings/pseuds/LovelyThings)**


	8. ACT II: The Adherent, Part III

**ACT II: The Adherent, Part III**

 

 **“W** here are you now, Rey?”

“A void.”

“What exists in this void?”

“Myself. And you.”

“What am I?”

“Annoying,” Rey replies with some churlishness, cracking an eye open to stare at the Sith sitting cross-legged across from her. 

Around where they both sit is darkness, deep and absolute like the bottom of a well. 

“Cheeky,” the Sith replies, keeping her terrible eyes shut. The ink of the tattoos around her eyes crinkles into folds as her lips tug up into a smile.

“You tend to bring that out in me while quizzing me with fifty questions,” Rey says, folding her hands across her ankles. The flesh beneath her hands is warm through the fabric. Rey has a hard time differentiating these dreams from reality—she wonders if they _are_ real from a certain perspective. 

The Sith shifts back her hood. Rey can make out the strands of golden hair brushing her shoulders, some of the ends dry and damaged. Her eyes finally open to show the ugly yellow wreathing the pupils. “A good master always brings their apprentice more questions than answers. The more you begin to puzzle them out, the more you discover for yourself. And _of_ yourself.” 

Rey keeps silent, biting back on the comment sitting far back in her mouth that the Sith is certainly not her master. She has none and never will. Rey keeps this thought safe and secret to herself, closing her mind around it as if she’s making a fist. 

Across from her, the woman shows no sign of having snatched that thought from her as easily as she has others when Rey was newer to the practice of sealing her mind off. The Sith continues on, unperturbed, “I thought it prudent to impart to you a small lesson while you dream. Time has a funny way of passing while you sleep, wouldn’t you agree? We’ve spoken so much over the months. All fit between the spaces of you slipping into sleep and waking.” 

“Then you'd better stop wasting time and get on with it. No telling when I might wake up,” Rey warns the Sith. There have only been a handful of times when she’s wrenched herself into wakefulness, and then only when Rey managed to strain against the invisible bonds holding her mind to this place where the Sith existed, buried deep in her mind. She was entrenched there, reachable only by deep sleep. 

Rey prefers she stay there. 

The Sith takes a moment’s pause to observe Rey, drumming her gloved fingers along her knee. Rey can’t tell if it’s annoyance or curiosity pulling her expression into odd angles. A tug at the corner of her mind reminds her that the grip the Sith has on her tonight is strong—there will be no escaping this lesson. 

“Bold of you,” the woman finally settles on something that resembles praise, “but it’s time you were told the words that were told to me, and my master. And his master before him. Words that will guide you as they have others that have come before you.” The Sith shuts her eyes, her hands folding outward to offer her palms up. _“_ Peace is a lie,” she starts, _“_ there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me. _”_

The words spoken have a power of their own. Rey has the impression that the code is a living thing, something as strong as the undertow of a great ocean. 

“Only passion,” Rey repeats, drawing imaginary circles on the skin of her ankle with her thumb.

“The code teaches us that our emotions are not to be held in check when most needed. Passion. We draw strength from these strong emotions, as you’ve discovered. Do you not feel a sense of power when you give in to your anger, your _rage_ when you fight that young man?”

“Yes,” Rey says, her hands and arms burning with the remembered strain of all the duels the knights have put her through. She remembers Kylo’s strikes the keenest, precise blows that are meant to press her back against the edge of the training square. Rey remembers the weight of her quarterstaff in her hands as it held back his lightsaber from her neck, his expression intense and outlined by the fire of the blade. 

“Does he not seem stronger the more you wound him, the harder you strike and thwart his maneuvers when you duel?” 

“He does,” Rey agrees, her fingers tightening around her ankle, holding onto it like an anchor. 

“My suggestion is to feed off of whatever emotions he doles out. Turn them on him as you have been doing. There is more you can do to weaken him and use him to your advantage,” she instructs, a faint spark of lightning dancing off her fingertips. She passes it from one palm to the other before it fizzles out. “I found many ways in my time. Even my master had his exploitable points.”

“You mention him a lot,” Rey notes. “Your master. Who was he?”

The Sith stares off at a spot over Rey’s shoulder, her face an impassive mask. “A man. Only a man. He was my salvation when I was young. He taught me the ways of the Force and how to master it. There was a peace between us for a time. It didn’t last.” 

There’s an ominous rumbling in her words. Rey does her best to tuck the knowledge away for later. There is a lot that the Sith says to her that she does not understand. 

“What were your names?” Rey asks as a way of pressing her question.

“Does that matter now?” the Sith asks her.

“No. Not anymore. Call it curiosity,” Rey replies, looking upward at the black void yawning overhead. 

“Our names have been lost to time, like so many others. Jedi, Sith, all that stand in-between the two sides of the Force.”

“Maybe it was all meant to be lost,” Rey decides, meeting the Sith’s yellow gaze. A pregnant pause stretches between them, then it is broken by the Sith glancing away. 

“Bide your time. When the opportunity arises, make your move. I will be there to help, should all else fail,” she says. “Remember: _the Force shall free me._ ”

“The Force shall free me,” Rey repeats like a mantra, the void and the Sith fading into nothing. 

Sound starts to filter into her ears. She feels the mattress beneath her, then the starchiness of the sheets covering her. Rey crooks her fingers around the pillow wedged under her head, finally opening her eyes to look out the narrow slat of her window. It’s raining again. There’s some dull rumblings of thunder that rattles the transparisteel glass in its frame, signaling the not-far-off approach of a storm. 

There’s a weak glow of what constitutes pre-dawn light behind the clouds. Rey rolls free of the sheets and winces at the cold contact her feet find on the floor. She shuffles into the ‘fresher to pee and scrub her teeth clean with paste. 

When she steps out to start braiding her hair, she plucks up the flat device perched on her desk. The screen lights up and she queues a program of her own making. Rey makes a stroke on the screen, generating another tally mark on her holopad. The screen is bright with the little white marks counting the days since she was taken off Jakku. Today marks the one-hundredth and twentieth day since she was taken off Jakku. Four months to the day. 

“Happy anniversary,” she mutters to herself, tossing the pad into the desk drawer before slamming it shut. Rey starts to yank open the drawers beneath her bed, pulling out her training blacks before someone shows up at the door to take her to the first round of dueling for the day. She flicks her fingers at the computer terminal on her desk, the screen flickering on to resume what she was doing last night before exhaustion made her crawl into bed. 

Sleep wasn’t exactly anticipated, considering what she found in her dreams. Dark circles were starting to build under her eyes and her skin was becoming sallow. Sunlight was a myth on Dromund Kaas, as was sound sleep. 

Once she’s clothed, Rey settles onto her knees before the window, spreading her palms out and closing her eyes in meditation. She can’t see the sun, but she can feel it rising if she stills her breath and reaches out with her senses. Time slows to a crawl and all she can feel is the air in her lungs, the sound of a holovid playing on her terminal a comforting melange of noise in the background.

Holonet access, while heavily monitored, proves to be an unending source of fascination for Rey. There’s trashy holovid shows numbering in the hundreds of thousands. There is everything from endless melodrama series from Onderon to very dated operas from the Old Republic. In her spare time before turning down her sheets for the night—when Sariss doesn’t have her in the hololibrary or Yun and Kylo aren’t both beating her black and blue during training drills that stretch into the wee hours of the morning—she boots up at least one vid to kill time and lull her into sleep.

“I’ll cut your holonet access if you keep watching these vids. They’re known to kill braincells,” Kylo’s voice rumbles from the doorway. She can never hear him come in. Sensing him is even harder. 

“Commander,” she bites out, trying to smother the annoyance at having been interrupted. These moments are supposed to be hers and hers alone—the ones stolen between sleep and training. Only then does she feel like she’s not being harassed by the living and the dead. 

Rey turns her head to get a good look at him. His hair is tousled and damp still from a shower. His face has become as familiar to her as her own, but still conveys the emotional range of a duracrete wall. He has one shoulder leaned up against the frame of the door, arms folded as he watches her. 

They get into these impasses that Rey can only describe as staring contests. Whoever makes the other uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact enough to look away first is the winner. At least in her mind that's how this works. Rey is getting better at it, and manages to win this round when Kylo finally breaks their gaze to look into the hall behind them. “Get up. Turn it off. You’re up against Yun again this morning.” 

Rey tries not to groan, unfolding herself from the floor. A tingling sensation rushes to her toes as blood flows back into her legs. She has to jog after Kylo’s retreating form as he strides off down the hallway. 

 

* * *

 

Yun, when armed, fights with something he calls a halberd for lack of a better term. It’s a metal pole with an elongated blade made of phrik with a reach that is at least a quarter longer than Kylo’s saber. Rey’s become intimately familiar with that reach, considering it’s nearly cleaved her head from her neck a number of times. 

“You keep sticking your neck out like that on swings, you’re going to end up like an Endorian chicken—plucked, cooked, and headless!” Yun bellows, swinging his halberd in a wide arc. Rey catches the edge of it after bracing her quarterstaff over her face, the force of the blow feeling like it’s rattling her entire skeleton. Her heels touch the edge of the training square; Rey has to double forward, heaving against the blade until she feels it slide off her quarterstaff and slant off her fingers. 

 _Gloves, thank the Force for gloves_ , she thinks, imagining how much skin might’ve come off if the blade had scraped across her bare knuckles. This week of training had seen her introduced to wearing a helm in combat. It was a smooth-surfaced, slick thing that encloses her head behind a sheet of thick, dull silver. It isn't terribly heavy like the others appeared, but then again it isn't modeled like theirs. It is meant to be lighter. A narrow visor is her window out onto the world, now tinged red with readouts scrolling in the margins of her vision. Heart rate. Atmospheric composition. Body temperature. Range to target. Other necessary statistics pinging along the HUD. 

 _Still not found a way out of here_ , she funnels that frustrated thought into a strike that shrieks off of Yun’s armored forearm. It sends him back a step. Rey scrambles to avoid the blow he aims at her legs, kicking off from the floor to jump as the _swoosh_ of the blade sounds from where her ankles were a second ago. 

There’s a flash of pale hair and dark robes swooping around the edge of the ring. Sariss. She joins Kylo at his customary observation spot, putting her head near his and saying something to him that is lost in the sound of metal hitting metal. 

 _Still fighting to keep myself in one piece_ , Rey fumes, finding her footing before she sends out a massive push of the Force at Yun’s front. He bends under the weight of the sudden rush of air and pressure, his heels scraping into the floor as he fights to keep standing.

“Break it off,” Kylo calls over the sound of their fighting. Rey snaps her quarterstaff back to click into the floor, trying to calm her breathing. 

“Rey,” Kylo beckons, turning to start off towards the hallway outside of the training room. Rey follows, handing off her quarterstaff to Sariss. The look on the other woman’s face is troubled as she takes Rey’s weapon, motioning her on. Yun joins her before Rey exits the room, his expression baffled. 

“What’s all this about?” he asks Sariss before Rey is out of earshot.

Kylo is almost about to turn the corner before she catches up with him, the sound of swishing fabric dying down as she slows her pace to a walk. “What is it?” She’s still not used to how her voice echoes in a metallic reverberation through the helm’s vocoder. 

“The Supreme Leader requires your presence.” Kylo doesn’t turn to look at her. She tries to not let her steps falter. She knew this day was coming. Very little has been said to her about the enigmatic man that the three knights so fervently believe in. The leader of the First Order. Her hands tighten into fists as they continue the rest of the journey to the sublevels in silence. There’s no reassurance to be had from him as he guides her to the doors that lead into the cavernous room she’s seen only in quickly snatched glances. 

Rey disengages the pressure clamps on the helm, feeling fresh air hit her sweat-matted hair and wet face. Her braid falls onto her neck. 

“Give it here.” Kylo holds out his hand. She places the helm into his outstretched palm, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear as he sets her gear into the crook of his arm. Rey fidgets with her tunic, smoothing it out. She looks up at Kylo’s quirked mouth and amused eyes. 

“You’ll be fine,” he finally says, leaning a shoulder against the wall beside the doors.

“Finally, reassurance,” she snaps out, rolling her eyes towards the hallway’s ceiling. Rey hesitantly reaches for the access panel, pressing her hand to it. The doors opens with a soft _beep_ after the panel scans her hand, the sensor warm under her skin. 

“You’ve earned it.” The door shuts and obscures her view of him. Rey presses her clammy brow to the cool metal, taking in a deep breath before turning to the cavernous room. It’s dark with a sloping stone floor that leads to a circular platform about ten meters below. She can make out a faint, bulky shape sitting on the platform. 

She begins to walk down the sloping walkway to the center of the cavern. Her boot heels echo off of the stone walls. There’s a sound of trickling water and someone taking slow, reedy breaths between the echoing of her steps.

Finally, a voice acknowledges her. The sound of it makes her freeze mid-step. “I have been wanting to meet you in person for quite some time now, Rey,” the voice rumbles. It’s coming from the center of the cavern, where the ground slopes down. It’s some sort of projection, faintly translucent the closer she comes to it. 

“Come closer, child,” he calls, for it is definitely a man. The voice is deep and the words are enunciated slowly, rasping with power that she feels more than hears.

He is sitting on something—what it is, she can’t tell. He is abnormally tall like Yun, but not impossibly so. He seems so skeletal and thin that the voluminous folds of the dark robe hangs like sackcloth on his frame. His body lists to the side, one elbow perched on the arm whatever he's sitting on. His face sags, deformed and twisted. The head seem disproportionate compared to the rest of him, dwarfing everything save for the hands. Hands that resemble spiders, pale as milk glass. 

“Sir,” she starts, uncertain of how to address him. Does she kneel? Does she bow?

“You stand, Rey. I will not ask you to do something you are uncertain of,” he rasps out, gesturing towards her. Every movement he makes is labored and slow. “After all, your loyalty is something I prize among all other things, something I hope to earn by speaking to you today.” 

“It’s a slim chance in hell that I’ll ever be loyal after what you and your people have put me through,” Rey bites out. She doesn’t care if he strikes her down now for her words. She has no loyalty to his people, or to him. Nothing that has been done to her has inspired a scrap of loyalty. Not even the faint sense of companionship she feels with Sariss, with Yun. Even with Kylo. She can’t bury what happened at Niima Outpost. Or in the temple. 

What’s left of his brow furrows. He sinks back into his seat, folding his hands together as he contemplates her. “Everything you’ve experienced up to this point has been for a purpose. To best serve _you_. Everything,” he states. 

“Is this your idea of a recruitment program? If it is it’s sorely lacking,” she spits out, throwing an arm towards the door. The silence that follows makes her believe she’s signed her own death warrant for her insolence, but instead of standing and ordering Kylo into the room to finally relieve her head from her neck, the Supreme Leader purses his lips and leans forward. His expression is one of intense curiosity as he folds his hands, long fingers interlocking together. The sight of them is unsettling and makes her stomach flip. 

“Perhaps this requires a more direct explanation of what I brought you in here to discuss,” he rumbles, fixing his eyes on her. They’re a strange, glassy blue. Rey feels something tug at her mind. She glances below and sees darkness rushing up to meet her.

 

* * *

 

Rey is on a ship. There is a low hum of pneumatic valves working behind the bulkhead she’s pressed up against; she pretends that the slow intakes and releases of air is a big animal sleeping beside her. It lulls her into a drowsy, dreamy state broken only by the sound of the airlock of the bunk room hissing open. The lights power on overhead, bright and powerful as they turn the world behind her eyelids a red glare that bleeds through the skin. Rey grunts and turns over in her cot, tugging the blankets over her head with small fingers. 

“S’not morning yet, papa,” she grumbles, every inch of her rebellious. She knows what time it is. It’s not even _breakfast_ yet. The weight of the steps coming towards her are her definitely papa’s—mama’s have a quick _ratt-tatt_ of boot heels hitting the floor. Papa’s are softer sounding. She can smell the grease on his hands and the sweat covering his clothes. 

Papa and mama both have had to dress in rags for months, everyone onboard imitating the mechanics and cargo loaders they’re pretending to be. They need to look like they belong on this rusty old freighter. They say it’s necessary, what they need to _do_ in order to get home. What is home, Rey wonders? Home for her had been their tidy, small house enclosed by the stone walls with the big fields beyond them, then home was here. This rusty ship with weird smells. It wasn’t so bad. There was all sorts of stuff to do on the ship that she couldn’t do back home.

Mama was always fixing things. Breaking them apart then putting them back together _better_. Papa was always helping the administrators, talking through deals for better parts from the traveling merchants who came to their tiny farming outpost. Her parents had saluted all the people waiting for them on this ship once it came for them, shaking hands and smiling. They all knew each other. When they brought Rey forward they said, “Our daughter.” 

The people had all smiled at her.

“Love, get up. _Get up_ ,” her father murmurs into her ear. Bits of his beard scrape against the skin of her forehead as he hoists her out of her cot, wedging her body against his shoulder. She feels the air whoosh against her cheek as the airlock opens. His feet hit the metal grate outside of the ship’s bunk room and start pounding down the corridor.

“S’not even breakfast,” Rey protests, her voice shrill in her own ears. She scrubs at her eyes and frowns, resting her head against her father’s big shoulder. She’s jostled against his neck as he runs with her in his arms. Rey tightens her grip around his neck, curling her legs against his chest. “Why are we running, papa? What’s wrong?”

“The bad people have caught up to us,” he tells her, breathless as he looks down one T-section of the ship’s corridors to the next. There’s a lot of noise coming from up ahead. Then the roar of something slamming against the hull, like a big beast or machine. The bulkhead down the way buckles. 

“Escape pods crushed from the impact after they broadsided us. We’re cooked, how did they get our coordinates?” she hears one man shouting from the bridge as they pass it. Rey catches sight of a big ship outside of the cockpit’s viewport. A big Hammerhead corvette, just like in mama’s holopad program! It’s really close to them.

Then Rey realizes that those are probably the bad people. Her parents have always warned her of them. People that would come and take them away, then take _her_ away. Freight and panic makes her throat close. The alarms start sounding. _Woooo, woooo_ , they go. And go. Her father starts to sprint.

“Where’s mama?!” Rey shouts, tears starting to bead down her cheeks. She’s scared. If they were all together, it would be less scary. Where could she _be_?

“She’s holding off the bad people with the others, sweetheart. They’re after everyone on this ship. They don’t want us to get where we’re going. They think we did something terrible to their friends, but they’re wrong.” Papa sounds angry—it’s not nice to be in trouble for something you didn’t do. Rey agrees. He skids to a stop near one of the panels near the engine room. She likes to play in the maintenance shafts. They’re just her size. Papa’s big hands clamp around the lever to open it, emptying out the contents of the compartment with hurried swipes of his hand. 

He sets Rey on the ground so he can use both of his hands to work. Down the corridor she hears the _ratt-tatt_ of mama’s boots on the floor grilles. She’s sprinting towards them, her hair flying like a pretty banner behind her.

“Mama!” Rey shouts, holding her hands up. She wants to be picked up, to be held. She knows she’s a big girl, but this is too scary for even big girls. Mama looks scared too, why won’t mama pick her up?

“They’re going to board, but they’re waiting. I think they’re going to vent the ship,” mama rushes out, handing off what she’s carrying to papa—an oxygen mask. Rey’s seen them before. Mama taught her how to use them. 

“Secure it over your face and breathe normally. Oxygen is flowing,” she quotes, proud that she remembers what mama taught her. 

Mama is crying, hysterical as she laughs and tucks Rey’s hair up. Papa does her hair, but mama’s getting better at tying it up like Rey likes it. “Yes, baby. Now crouch down, there’s not a lot of time left.”

“Will she be safe?” her father asks, holding the panel open. Rey shuffles into the tight space. It’s a game, right? She hides, they seek. But they’re doing it all _wrong_ if they know where she’s hiding already.

“It’ll vacuum seal. I made sure it’s pressurized and insulated. If they vent the atmosphere of the ship, she’ll be safe from the freeze,” her mother scrambles to adjust the mask over Rey’s face. There’s a hissing sound from far off, then another big bump that shakes the whole ship. Mama screams, her face getting red and _mad_. She says a bad word. 

Her father clamps the oxygen mask over the lower half of her face, shouting over the din of alarms, “Breathe—there, love.” The mask covering her face grows damp as she breathes in and out, wetness building up on the inside of it. 

“We love you,” her mother whispers into her ear. Papa and mama both lean in and hug her, crowding her small space. Rey feels tears slip down her cheeks as her mother shoves her further into the compartment, sealing the door on her. It’s dark and cramped. It’s not fun in here when it’s not for playtime. “MAMA! PAPA! LET ME OUT! I DON’T WANT TO BE IN HERE!” Rey hollers, pounding on the hatch.

“Hush, love. It’ll be over soon. Remember to make lots of noise after-” her mother shouts over the din of the alarms. Then Rey hears the roar of air, like a wind tunnel. Or a ship launching. Her mother screams, papa yells, then there’s no more noise. 

The alarms stop. Rey scrambles in the tight, cramped compartment, her fists hurting as she keeps beating on the hatch. “Mama…papa?” she asks. A few minutes pass. Rey fidgets, hiccuping. Her face is all sticky from tears and she’s shaking. Then she hears the alarms come back on, then stop again. There’s more hissing noises and finally she hears footsteps outside. 

A grumbly voice, “Buncha dead Imps. That’s the first thing I wanna see, boarding a ship!” 

Another voice, like the young guys she knew back home. The tall ones. “But no Beck. That was bad info, what that weasel gave us. It’s only netted us the small fry, not the commander herself.”

“She’s probably scuttled off to whatever hiding place she can find, Ematt. We might not see her scarred mug for a long while,” Grumbly voice says. “Woah. Look what we have _here_. The love birds.”

Someone is grunting in Huttese. Rey can pick up a few of the words, mostly bad ones. Rey remembers what mama told her. _Make noises. Lots of them._ She kicks her feet against the metal.

“What the kriff was that?” Young guy asks. Rey hears a blaster powering up. 

“Mama? Papa?!” Rey hollers, pounding on the panel. If someone doesn’t get her out, she’ll be stuck. The panel opens and she sees the green skin of a big twi’lek. Rey crouches into the compartment, suddenly not brave anymore. He’s scary.

“There’s a kid here, sir,” the twi’lek shouts over his shoulder. 

“ _Shit_ ,” says the young guy, leaning down to get a look at her. Rey darts out real quick, starting to run. Her feet trip over someone laying on the floor. She hits the floor grate, wincing as she feels her wrist buckle under her weight. It really hurts. She looks back to see who was laying there.

She sees her mother’s hair, frozen with a sheet of ice. Her skin is glassy looking. Papa is laying over her. They’re frozen together. “MAMA! PAPA!”

Rey struggles over on her hands and knees, tears pinging against the metal grates below. She tries to shake both of them. “Mama, wake up. Papa,” she calls, like they do to her when they’re trying to wake her up. Their eyes stare. They don’t move. 

“C’mere, kid,” one of the men says. He sounds kind of sad. Finally the men move after standing there like statutes, watching her. Rey stands up, curling her hands into fists. She sniffles. The man comes close. She kicks him in the shin _really_ hard when he’s finally close enough. He yelps and pulls back. 

Another comes forward, yanking her up by her arm. She struggles but he's too strong. It’s the younger guy with the beard and a blaster. “We’ve got no space for an Imp brat. The first inhabited world we come across, dump her. The more remote, the better. This op was supposed to have _never happened_ , you hear me?” 

“We could just bring her into the Core, dump her off at the first port with an orphanage or someone that could take her in,” suggests the fat twi’lek man. He looks really bothered by what the bearded guy is saying.

The bearded guy drags her over to the twi’lek. He snarls in his face. Rey’s arm _hurts_. “When we register at a civilized world’s dock, what’s it gonna look like if we cart her off to the nearest orphanage? Bring a screaming girl back into Republic space, talking about her parents and how we just spaced them? Someone might start believing her and look into it.”

“We could just…” the guy whose shin she kicked gestures, motioning at her with his blaster. Rey shrinks into the bearded guy’s side despite herself. 

“No. We’re not gonna do that,” the bearded guy holding her by the arm grits out, dragging her behind him as he starts off. 

They fasten her to a bench in one of their transport ships stored in their cargo hold. What follows is a big blur. They break off from the freighter, make a jump to hyperspace, then fade out of it. The three men board the transport and ease it out of the bay. They steer the ship into the atmosphere of a bright, sandy colored planet and land. The sun blinds her from where she’s sitting in the back. Rey knows the motion of a ship well and doesn’t need a viewport in front of her to know what’s happening. She sits on the bench and shivers, too scared to move off of it. 

The bearded guy gets off the ship for a short while before coming back onboard and into the cargo hold, grabbing her by the arm as he unlocks her cuffs. She bites him. 

“DAMNIT,” he hollers, reeling his hand back. He slaps her. Really hard. Rey can feel blood in her mouth. She starts to cry again. Wetness trickles down her legs. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be back with mama and papa. Another hand clamps around her forearm as the young guy shoves her towards someone standing down the exit ramp of the transport. It’s a big, blobby alien with the ugliest face she’s ever seen. Rey starts to scream as he drags her to the sandy ground below. It’s bright, so bright outside. The man is walking back up the ramp. The engines start to roar and the blobby alien starts walking towards a dusty building and some ratty tents far away from the landing pad.

Rey’s voice is hoarse from yelling. She knows that once they leave, that part of her life is over.

“NO! COME BACK, COME BACK!” If she is loud enough, they will come and take her back her parents. They have to come _back_. She thinks of her mother—frozen and stiff like a statue, eyes wide open in surprise. Her father, hunched over and covering her body, bits of his skin glued to hers forever.

“Quiet, girl,” the blobby alien snarls, pulling her back. The sand rushes up around her ankles to swallow her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings, dear readers. An update with a big twist to kick the week off! As always, thank you for the lovely comments, bookmarks, and kudos. They mean the world to me.
> 
> A few notes:
> 
>   * Snoke is broadcasting himself with his ‘true height’ to Rey, meaning his projection isn’t ginormous as it usually is. This is intentional. According to Neal Scanlan, chief of creature and droid effects, Snoke is about 7-foot tall when he’s not catfishing everyone as being a couple of meters tall. 
>   * [Major Caluan Ematt](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Caluan_Ematt) of the Resistance is indeed a canon character. In the days of the Rebellion, he was a lieutenant with the [Shrikes](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shrikes), a group of recon specialists that were ambushed by Commander Beck of the Imperial Security Bureau after the Battle of Yavin. 
> 



	9. ACT II: The Adherent, Part IV

**ACT II: The Adherent, Part IV**

 

 **F** irst the minutes go by. Then the hours. Hours progress until the afternoon becomes dusk, then night. Kylo paces a path from one end of the corridor to the next, Rey’s helm sitting solemnly by the shut entrance to the chamber. 

Finally he sits across from it, his back to the wall and arms folded in meditation. He locks eyes with the visor—the featureless mask stares back solemnly. No noise comes from within the chamber. The door remains resolutely shut before he unfolds himself from the floor. He checks the chrono on a mainframe computer near the end of the hall. It’s nearly 23:00. Rey went in at 14:00. 

Kylo decides has to get out of the corridor he’s been alternating sitting or standing in for the last nine hours. He scrubs a hand over his jaw, deciding that stealing away for ten minutes to grab water will probably bring him back to the same scenario: waiting. He could use a ‘fresher as well.

He stops in the galley after depositing Rey’s helm in her quarters. It’s already occupied by the other two knights in residence, sitting far back at the microscopic table pressed against the wall. The two of them are bent over steaming cups of something faintly herbal smelling and look as if they’ve been waiting up. Their expressions become floored when they observe only him coming into the galley.

“You’re joking me. Is he _still_ not done with her?” Yun asks, slightly awed. Kylo turns and yanks open the refrigerator unit to pull a bottle of water free from a plastoid-wrapped pack. “I can’t recall the last time he’s spent that much time speaking over the comms with someone besides you.”

Kylo closes the door to the unit, sits down, and cracks the lid on the water bottle. He drinks about a third of it before acknowledging the question.

“He’s still speaking with her,” he says. Kylo wipes his mouth with the back of his arm, staring at the wall across from him. It reminds him of Rey after a fashion. He tried to reach her from where he stood in the corridor many times as the night wore on—as usual, he was met with the solid wall that is her mind. Blocked. When he first met her she was an endless stream of thoughts and impressions projecting directly into the forefront of his mind. Now there is absolutely nothing when he reaches for her, as if she has tamped down on her thoughts like someone wrenching shut a leaky faucet. 

“Probably a lot to cover. Call it her orientation meeting,” Sariss reasons, handwaving the situation as if it’s nothing to raise concern over. Still, Kylo can’t root out the sense of wrongness in his gut. But he is confident in the Supreme Leader’s ability to open Rey’s eyes and make _see_ what she’s being offered, as he did for him so many years ago. 

The Supreme Leader will show her the way to them. 

“That’s a good equivalent for it. So why are you up here if she’s still down there?” Yun spins his cup in his hands, the tea within sloshing up the shallow sides. The size of his hands make the cup look miniscule. A thin skin is forming on the surface of the tea, translucent and flimsy. 

“Killing time until he releases her,” Kylo says. Another third of the water bottle’s contents go down his throat. It’s a cool relief and soon the scratchiness tickling the back of his throat abates. 

Yun grins, as if he’s just let him in on a great secret. “I think she’s done with being escorted, if that’s what you were waiting to do. Certainly she knows her way back to her own room,” Yun cuts off his comments to take a sip. “I see how she looks at everything—no doubt she’s got quite the extensive map of this place sketched out her mind. Still, she’s not going anywhere.”

Sariss sits back in hard in her chair, chewing on her lip as her face takes on a thoughtful expression. The contents of her cup start to spin of their own volition. Kylo raises his eyebrow at her. “I think you’d better just say it and not stew,” he says bluntly.

“Yun said something that made me realize…” she pauses, staring at the watery contents of her cup. “I haven’t been able to see clearly into her since I met her. Sure, I’ve caught snatches of her thoughts during her first month of training, but over time she’s shuttered herself off. That’s a substantial amount of skill for someone who has only just been taught how to block attempts to dig into her mind.”

“I’ve noticed. She’s exceeded all of my expectations,” Kylo admits. A bystander could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows.

“Did we get that on a recording?” Yun finally asks Sariss after the initial shock passes. “That’s the closest he’s come to giving someone a compliment in what, five years?”

Kylo pinches the bridge of his nose, tipping his face up to the ceiling. “You both create too many headaches to get praised for anything,” he growls. 

The both of them smile in unison. Sariss leans over her cup, her tone conspiratorial as she confides, “We know you love dealing with the more administrative aspects of being commander. We’re here to help you keep busy.”

Kylo can feel a headache building behind his eyelids. He checks the wall chrono. It’s only been five minutes since he walked in. “The last time you two tried to keep me _busy_ , there was an entire patrol that had to be diverted to assist you.”

Yun draws himself up, seemingly affronted by the very thought that he was responsible in part for that incident. “I lay the blame on Sariss for that shitstorm, so don’t lump me in with her,” he says. “She’s the one who misread the tablet and thought that the tomb was _allegedly_ haunted. Not _definitely_ haunted like it turned out to be.”

“You couldn’t get me back on Moraband if you paid me,” Sariss mutters, hiding her face in her cup as she takes a long sip. But she doesn’t deny Yun’s words. She sets down her tea. “With all of that said, the esoteric aspects of the Force are something that I should cover with Rey before our time on Dromund Kaas comes to an end. You both have done wonderfully in training her on the more combat reliant methods of it, but it’s high time she learned skills that could be beneficial to her down the road.”

“I like how we’ve spoken in the past about how mysterious her circumstances were in the temple, then just now how elusive and cagey she is with her thoughts. Now you want to go ahead and teach her the more dangerous arts she can implement with only her mind,” Yun says more to the ceiling than to Sariss, tipping back in his chair. He crosses his arms behind him to cradle the back of his head between his interlaced fingers. 

Sariss pulls a face at Yun that Kylo can only peg down as irritation. 

“Let me worry about that part of her training,” Kylo tells Sariss. “And you mentioned dangerous—have you learned anything from the holocron?”

Sariss exhales out of her nose, the new topic obviously one of extreme frustration to her by the mere mention it. “It doesn’t respond to any of my attempts to communicate with it. It’s simply shut off. No reaction to stimuli. I’ve exhausted all the available research on holocrons themselves—nothing.”

“Probably for the best,” he reasons. Still, there’s a faint twinge Kylo feels at the lost prospect of encountering a working holocron. “There’s a reason the Sith guarded their knowledge.”

There’s a lull in the conversation, the silence broken only by the sounds of the other two sipping their tea and him tightening his hand into a fist around his water bottle. 

“We should discuss her weapon,” Yun is the first to break the silence. “Obviously she’ll need something suited for melee combat. She’s handy with a blaster and a rifle, but she’s most substantial with a long handled weapon. Her quarterstaff, for example. She needs a _blade_ , not a stick.” 

Kylo knows that a “blade” to the knights is doublespeak for that which all of them crave: a lightsaber. 

“I think the Supreme Leader might object to her carrying around one,” Kylo admits. 

“I think he’ll make an exception, considering she’s going to end up under you.” Sariss obviously meant the comment to be innocuous, but Kylo can hear the faint tone of amusement at the tail of her sentence. 

“Stop that,” he grits out.

“Stop what?”

“ _That_ ,” he repeats, knowing that _she_ knows what he means. If it were anyone else their head would be sailing across the room, relieved from the offender’s neck. But this is Sariss, the woman who accepted him and his command over her along with Yun without a second thought after he first joined the Order. Her and Yun get a pass by him in some situations.

Sariss holds up her hands, bowing her head. “Fine—let me rephrase. She’ll end up in your command. What then? She can repel blaster bolts with the Force, deflect them off the quarterstaff since the metal is reinforced. But what she really needs is a _blade_ to be any sort of match for your pace on the field.”

“The Supreme Leader was hesitant to allow me to continue to carry mine—it’s a reach that he’d let her wield one when she has no loyalty towards us.”

“Speaking of, it’s impressive you managed to construct it in the first place without any formal instruction, let alone with materials consisting of junk and a cracked crystal.” Yun turns his emptied cup upside down onto the table. 

“I had to manage. If Skywalker wouldn’t teach me, I decided I would teach myself.”

The lights in the galley surge with a sudden output of power. They gutter for a moment before finally stabilizing. 

“Another lightning storm?” Yun wonders, glancing up.

“If it fries the generators again, I’ll _scream_ ,” Sariss hisses, clutching her cup.

Kylo watches as a slow but sure tremor starts on the surface of her tea. All three of them look down at their feet as they sense the faint vibrations through the floor. It feels like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Yet it is silent from where they sit.

In seconds, all of them are out the galley and heading towards the lifts in a cohesive blur.

What they soon find below in the sublevels is darkness. The corridors that stretch to the left and right are pitch-black beyond the artificial glare of light from the turbolift. Finally, the emergency lights blip into existence along the floor. They cast a dim red glow on the scene that lays before the three of them as they step in the direction of the communications chamber.

“Shit,” Yun says succinctly once the situation becomes apparent. 

Kylo has to agree with his assessment. The corridor before them is not the one he left behind a couple of minutes ago. The floor panels, ceiling, and walls are warped. A substantial amount of force has pushed outwards on them like air in a pressurized canister, seams and bolts popped to expose the duracrete behind the metal. And even that has cracks in it.

A brief glance into the audience chamber—easy to do as its doors have been blown off their frames and tilt drunkenly against the opposing wall—shows it to be empty and still in one piece. He turns to look at the other two with him. The emergency lights cast a bloody glow on the knights. It lengthens the shadows on their faces, turning them ghoulish. 

“Did _she_ do all of this?” Sariss asks, her voice barely above a whisper. Her eyes glance up and then down the dark corridor, reaching for the blaster he knows she carries beneath her robes. Rey did this. He can feel the pall of her rage hanging in the air, written like a signature into the bowed walls. 

“I don’t sense her in the compound,” Kylo grits out. He starts stalking in the direction of the hanger bay. He hears the Sariss and Yun fall in step behind him.

“How did she get out? She doesn’t even have access to-" Sariss gets her answer when she catches sight of the hanger bay door. It’s been pried open to make a small enough opening for a person to slip through into the vehicle bay that opens out onto the jungle floor. “Well, that answers that.”

“Like I said, she’s topping his repair costs only five months in,” Yun mutters.

“Shut up,” Kylo snarls. His patience finally has run out. “Shut up and _find_ her.”

* * *

 When the Supreme Leader had said all that he could say, done all that he could have done, Rey sat and stared at the spot where his projection had been for a long time. The hypnotic cadence of his words still rung in her ears. So much time elapsed that she lost track of it. _Shock_ , a distant, far-away part of her realized. _I’m in shock._

The worst mistake was to stand after that realization. Rey could feel the ground beneath her feet and the air wafting around her arms. What she saw was real, what she _learned_ was real. First it was the shock. Then came the rage, hot and keen enough to cut. Reality itself telescoped into a blur. She felt metal crunch and stone tear. 

 _Out_. Out. 

_Got to get out._

Air.

Ground beneath her, real and loamy. 

Cool, dark stone and water. 

There.

 _There_.

When she comes back to herself, she’s braced against slanting rock. It’s a familiar cave near the jungle paths where she and Kylo run. A grotto with a vaulted ceiling of stalactites dripping into lumpy stalagmites, it is tucked away in a shallow pit in the terrain, vines growing over the entrance and a narrow crag overhead that opens like a skylight into it; the only resident of this glum little cave is a crumbling statue of a long dead Sith. His helmed face stares impassively at her from where she stands shaking on a low rock wall, slick with rainwater and runoff from the small waterfall that flows into this chamber. 

The light from overhead is only ambient—it’s cloudy outside and the nights here are dark. Only the rare flash of lighting illuminates the cave to clearly to where she can see beyond a few meters. Rey has no recollection of how she came to this place. There’s a distinct tremor in her legs and arms, as if she’s exerted herself beyond any limit she’s known. There’s a pounding in her head. Even the dark spot where she knows the Sith resides is obscured by the roar of noise in her mind. The chirps and rustling of insects is a low murmur that takes away some of the sounds filling her head.

Rey wanders aimlessly along the rock edifice, one arm extending to feel her way in the dark. Her hands are bloody, some nails broken off at the quick. The pain is dull and throbbing, radiating from the tips of her fingers. A niche in the cave’s walls provides a natural shelf for her to sit on. It’s close enough to the thick stream of water pouring over the lip of the crag above. Droplets mist over her face. 

This place reminds her of the cool caves in the many narrow canyons in the Badlands, only wetter. Unbidden, her memory travels beyond the cool, dry sandstone caves to the downed destroyers pockmarking the desert. A graveyard for Imperials, just as those people who put here there intended it to be. Too cowardly to give her a clean death, they intended her to waste away in the sand, the heat. Grow old and lined with age and die quietly, unobtrusively—without creating a problem for them. She tips her face up to the Jakku sun and closes her eyes against the glare, the red bleeding through. 

Someone is touching her shoulder. She can feel it distantly, as if her real self is cocooned deeper within and what exists outside is a mere shell. The heat of Jakku’s sun fades. Sand shifting underfoot becomes solid stone. Sound rushes back into her ears. Rey feels the rock she’s sitting on, the wet scrape of moss-covered stone against her back. 

 _Rey_.

Kylo. He’s so close that she can smell the faint scent of his sweat mixing with the detergent of his clothes, the tang of oil ever-present beneath his fingernails. It’s familiar. His hand. Big enough to cup the ball of her shoulder in his palm. 

“What are you _doing_?” His voice comes out as a strained hiss. His grip tightens on her shoulder. 

He shouldn’t be angry at her. Not now.

“Did you know?” she asks. There’s a tremor in her voice. She can feel moisture tracing down her face and isn't sure if it's her or the mist. Her mouth twists, fingers tightening. Out of the corner of her eye she sees him tense, drawing himself up for a fight. He’s still dressed in his training clothes, rain and sweat tracking across his face. The weak ambient light from the crag above trickles in to illuminate half of his expression. 

Anger coils in her belly, hot and burning. She raises to her feet to face him, balling her fists up. He doesn’t move, his eyes locked onto her. The ground beneath her buckles. The heavy torrent of water cascading through the crag in the grotto’s ceiling freezes in its fall beside her, droplets suspended. 

“They’re dead. All of them are dead. I was waiting for _nothing_ , because they’re all dead. Don’t you understand me? DEAD.” Her voice goes from a calm monotone, then takes on an edge of anger and hysteria. She wants to laugh at the situation, at herself. Years of waiting for nothing, for no one. Kylo reaches out to grip her arms as she sways, her head tipping back. She starts to laugh. 

His expression is one of confusion. “I don’t understand you,” he insists, tightening his hold on her. Her anger fades for a moment, then doubles back. He is as ignorant of everything as she was. The sounds of her laughter stop ringing off the walls. Instead the slow, simmering roar of rage takes up residence in her head again.

“You want to see it? See it,” Rey spits out, gripping his head as she forces her way into his mind. Everything spills from her to him, every motion and minutiae of a day she didn’t know existed until now. The day that put her on Jakku and a void formed where memories should’ve been, leaving her with only the hope that her family would come back for her. The rest shrouded by shock. He fights at first, but gradually he sinks into the mire of her mind. 

Minutes pass. He releases his grip on her, his hands falling to his sides.

For a long time they don’t speak at all. They turn to watch the waterfall trickle into the shallow pool at the feet of the statue. Something important stretches between them—a shared pain. Empathy.

_Compassion._

“I didn’t want to believe him at first,” Rey croaks. “But the more he spoke, the more real it became. The more sense it made. He said my mother was a shipwright with the Engineering Corps. My father was a loyalty officer with the Security Bureau. They served with distinction. Hard workers,” she chokes on that, her head bowing under the weight of that small piece of knowledge. She _knew_ something about them now. Even if she didn't have them, she still had that. “They were labeled along with the other Imperials as war criminals that had no place in the New Republic. They retreated to the Outer Rim to wait for an opportunity to rejoin with what was left of the fleet, dodging bounties and warrants. I happened during their waiting, then the opportunity came up to rejoin a few other families fleeing for the Unknown Regions.

“Caluan Ematt. That’s his name. The Leader said that him and his crew were acting against orders by doing what they did—helping him retaliate for a team he lost to the Empire,” she spits out, what nails she didn't break biting into her palms. It’s hard enough to cut. “Helping others get even for the losses they suffered during the war. _The only good Imp is a dead Imp_. I remember one of them saying that now. Someone tipped them off about the transport all of us were on as it was on its way to the rendezvous point near Jedha, on the edge of the Mid Rim. To rejoin the Imperial Remnant. The corvette they were chasing us in crushed the port side of the freighter and the escape pods first, then they fired at the life support. On a civilian ship. Too cowardly to even let them _fight_ for their lives. They suffocated in the cold, in the dark. Like vermin.”

She feels Kylo’s arm brush against the skin of her bicep. He’s moved closer to her, standing in solidarity next to her as she recounts everything.

“He said you knew Ematt. Or did know him, once,” she admits. "He says you have just as good a cause as mine to hate the Resistance, the Republic." It’s like she’s leveled a punch at his gut. He seizes up next to her, drawing away. She can feel the anger radiating off him in waves. _Why?_ She does not know.

“I knew _of_ him,” he corrects her after he collects himself, his big hands stretching out from the fists he had them balled into. 

“The Leader says he’s with the Resistance now. Under General Organa. A major, despite what he did. There's no way he managed to cover up all the lives he took over the years, hunting Imperials down.” Rey can barely hear it—the sudden sharp intake of breath. The tension coiling in his shoulders from the corner of her eye. She’s struck another nerve. Even in this fog of emotion she’s in, she notices. 

“What do you want?” he finally asks, his voice barely heard above the roar of the water. His hand clasps her shoulder, pressing down. It is a touch, a solid connection of flesh on flesh at a time when she needs to know she’s not alone in this moment.

It’s the simplest question he’s asked of her. 

“I want them dead.”

And the easiest to answer. 

Rey steps away from the lip of the ledge looking over the pool. She turns, pacing like a caged beast. Rounding on the wall, she puts her fist into it with a dull, fleshy thud. The shock rockets up into her elbow, then her shoulder. She barely feels it.

 _Passion. Strength. Power._ Each thought flows into a blow against the rock. 

The impact of her fists against the wall bends the rock inward. Another splits the rock into fragments that ping off the walls and into the pool of water below. Kylo doesn’t flinch. Rey can’t contain her anger, can’t simply ball up her fists and scream. She wants to hit something, to hit _someone._ She wants to visit this pain she feels in the pit of her stomach on others, on the ones that did this to her. To those she could've loved, did love. Pain lances up her arm as her knuckles split, but all she can focus on is the image of the man in her mind’s eye.

Caluan Ematt. A name is all she needs. “I want him dead. Him, the Resistance, the Republic. All of them can _burn_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings, readers. As you can see, Snoke has got Rey drinking the collective First Order Kool-Aid at this point. I look forwards to the comments on this chapter, as it was one of the harder ones to write. This was all about shifting Rey to be diametrically opposed to the Resistance, but justifiably so with the reasons lain before her. As always, thank you all for the kudos, comments, and bookmarks. I look forward to them daily. Until next time!
> 
> A few notes:
> 
>   * Sariss mentions the world of [Moraband](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moraband), the home of the ancient Sith. Also known as Korriban, it is a dusty world of tombs, magic, and buried knowledge. It is within the vicinity of Dromund Kaas in a sector filled with mostly uninhabited planets known as the [Sith Worlds](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_Worlds). 
>   * The statue in the grotto is that of [Revan](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Revan), a polarizing figure from the Old Republic. When Dromund Kaas was inhabited by the resurgent Sith Empire hundreds of years after the events of _KOTOR I_ and _II_ , a splinter faction of [‘Revanites’](http://Balancing%20the%20light%20and%20dark%20sides%20of%20the%20Force,%20the%20Order%20sought%20to%20change%20the%20Empire%20from%20within,%20and%20they%20accepted%20members%20from%20all%20levels%20of%20Imperial%20society%20and%20even%20alien%20species,%20just%20as%20Revan%20had%20done.) (a group that fanatically followed Revan’s teachings) created a secret place in the jungle outside of the capital to practice their beliefs without persecution from the Sith. 
> 



	10. ACT II: The Adherent, Part V

**Act II: The Adherent, Part V**

 

 **T** he floor meets his face with a resounding thud. When the tremendous pressure holding him there abates, Kylo lifts his head up. Blood patters onto the stone floor. He barely feels the pain of the gash on his chin.

“You will tell her _nothing_ ,” Snoke hisses, his hand curling into a claw. His master points it at him. The hologram projection shimmers as the connection fluxes, but only for a fraction of a second. “Not one breath. That fabrication is the strongest thing holding her to our cause.”

He had witnessed Snoke’s anger only a handful of times and always it was directed at others. Never him—his apprentice, his chosen. He was set apart from the rest that Snoke jerked around like puppets.

Snoke raises his hand, touching the sagging half of his ruined face in a very human gesture of exasperation. Through the Force, he feels the disappointment radiating off of him. Shame shoots straight to Kylo’s gut. He’s made it his business to never feel something as low and common as shame, but there it is—seething and ugly. “Rise,” his master commands him with a wave of his hand.

Kylo obeys, scrambling to first get his knees under him, then his feet. His hands balance on the rocky floor and push him up. He feels distant from his actions, running on autopilot. The wound on his chin has yet to clot. Blood drips down and soaks the neck of his tunic. The shame freezing his face turns colder, deadening into nothing.

 _You feel nothing_ , he tells himself, his eyes fixed on the Supreme Leader. _You feel nothing._

“Your empathy for the girl is clouding your judgement,” his master explains, patience overtaking the disappointment in his expression. Kylo fights the urge to fidget, to break eye contact with the blue, icy gaze of the Supreme Leader and stare at the floor instead.

 _You feel nothing_ , he repeats like a mantra. Kylo swallows past the tight knot in his throat and wills the shame out of him. He tightens his fists. The leather of his gloves creaks.

If his grandfather never flinched before the Emperor, then he would not flinch before the Supreme Leader. He keeps that thought barricaded in his mind, unwilling to let it slip to the forefront for Snoke to catch.

When Kylo acknowledges Snoke’s statement with nothing more than a deferent nod, his master sighs.

The projection shimmers again. Thunder rumbles in the distance. It is loud enough to make the floor beneath his boots vibrate. “In time, you will see,” he hears Snoke say. “You will know that my course of action is what’s best for her. Only through her hatred can she achieve her full potential.”

Kylo can feel his head dip in another automatic nod of agreement. It’s reflexive. _A defense mechanism_ , a distant part of himself snidely puts in. _Roll over for him, why don’t you? It’s all the same_. He catches these thoughts and shutters them away before they can escape. He focuses on projecting utter agreement and devotion, convincing enough that his master can feel it from where he sits hundreds of star systems away.

“Her rage must be tempered and given a focus. I have given her one. Once she joins you in the field, the two of you will work wonders in the name of the First Order.” Snoke’s voice rises in cadence and energy. The fervor that once inspired him is not the flash-fire it used to be. It’s a muted, distant thing the so-called master of the Knights of Ren feels.

Kylo finally manages a verbal reply. “Yes, master.”

Snoke waves his hand, for all appearances placated with his responses. “You will report to the _Supremacy_ with your new lieutenant when you and the others leave Dromund Kaas. Sariss and Yun will rejoin the Third Fleet’s operations. The time is upon us.”

With that, the projection of Snoke winks out and leaves an empty dais in the cavernous stone room. The thick flow of blood from his chin has started to dry and crust in his tunic. He unclenches his fists until his hands hang loose at his sides.

Kylo stares at the spot where the projection of his master was for a long moment before he walks out to the corridor. The small army of mouse droids that maintain the complex are out in force, patching up dents and cracks in the damaged walls.

A few of the droids are working on the door to the vehicle bay. It’s been malfunctioning since Rey pried it open in her anger, intermittent sparks flying as the metal panels scrape against the ceiling. Every so often the big doors jerk as the motor engaged automatically, trying to shut the panels that hang lopsided off their tracks.

He steps over a mouse droid and braces an arm on the wall, pressing his brow into it.

 _You feel nothing_ , he reminds himself again.

The exchange had all started with a simple question.

_That was all a lie, wasn’t it?_

Then his chin was jerked towards the floor and the skin split against the rock.

 _Your empathy for the girl_ , his master had said. Kylo’s hands tighten into fists again. The lights in the recesses overhead start to stutter. The loose panels of durasteel warped on the walls rattle. The closest mouse droid _whirrs_ around to face him before it speeds away, as though fleeing.

Any attempts to master his breathing are futile. He’s far beyond breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth to quell the rage like his uncle had taught him. It’s all he can do to keep from flying apart at the seams. Every part of him burns with anger and there’s a roaring in his ears he can’t shut out.

The last mouse droid scurries away.

Rey had slipped in when he wasn’t guarding himself, obtrusive and stubborn. Like a desert weed growing through the cracks.

Snoke was right.

 _He’s right_ , Kylo fumes.

The rattling of the metal panels grows louder. _You’ve got a boiling point, Ben,_ Luke had told him years ago. The unbidden image of his uncle’s face is the last straw.

He unhooks his saber from his belt, ignites, and starts wildly hacking at the wall.

 _You do feel something_ , that treacherous part of him whispers. Kylo drowns it out with the shriek of his saber on metal and stone.

 

* * *

 

Numbness.

As she sits, she feels a tingling in her fingertips. Rey touches them to her palms, pressing her back into the transparisteel of her only window in her dimly lit room. It’s cool and solid, grounding her while she focuses inward. Her mind has stopped racing like a malfunctioning accelerator. She knots her hands in the towel in her lap, bringing it up to wring out more water from her unbound hair before she works on rebraiding it.

Kylo had ordered her back up to her room when they returned to the compound in the early morning hours. Their long, silent trudge through the jungle had been punctuated only by the slosh of their boots in the mud. It had rained steadily all the way back and the water had plastered his hair to his skull. He’d kept a substantial distance between them with a long, urgent stride. When she’d reached out to him with the Force, she could feel discomfort and confusion boiling just beneath the surface. It was like touching a hot burner with her mind.

Rey had withdrawn after that, saying nothing to him when they walked through the vehicle bay and down the warped corridor to the lifts. _I did all of this_. It had looked like some great hand had clamped around the hall and squeezed it like an empty can. The metal sheets on the walls were crinkled like paper.

Everything after the memory the Supreme Leader resurfaced for her was a blur. She could barely remember getting out of the compound to the grotto where Kylo found her. But even that was something she could at least string into a sequence in her mind. The memory he’d shown her grows less clear by the hour. Only the faces of the men who marooned her on Jakku stick out against the hazy backdrop.

Rey reaches the end of her braid and finishes it off with a hair tie. She desperately wills herself to fetch back a clear image of her father, her mother. All she receives is a fuzzy impression—mere footnotes in what should be a detailed description that she can reference.

The Supreme Leader didn’t even give her their names.

 _Get their names next time. More information_ , she tells herself. She curls her fingers towards her palms, her nails biting into the skin and reopening the scabbed-over cuts.

Just as she’s ready to lift herself off the floor and change out of her wet clothes, a chirp from her door’s access panel catches her attention. Then the door hisses open. Kylo’s large body crowds the frame, silhouetted by the light from the corridor outside.

The look on his face freezes her where she sits.

His chin is a mess of blood and cracked skin, black from where it has crusted over and clotted. It paints his neck down to the collar of his tunic like a wide, red ribbon. Rey can see his mouth tremble as he looks her over, his expression closed off. When she reaches for him with the Force, she can feel only…

_Fear._

His lightsaber is in his hand. Rey recognizes the grip he’s using—she’s seen it scores of times when he’s about to bring the blade to life. His thumb rests on the ignition switch. One slide and the laser would manifest. Her back scrapes up the length of the window behind her as she stands. She can feel her stomach drop as the fear from him bleeds into her. Their eyes lock and he closes the distance between them very suddenly, crossing the room in swift strides. The door automatically shuts behind him.

He’s made up his mind. She recognizes the look in his eyes, the sort of look she got when she had to choose between eating or starving through the day to stretch out her ration packs on Jakku. The kind of look she saw in the mirror when she resolved to bear down on her training and outdo their expectations because she is a _survivor_ and nothing they can do will break her.

But those decisions are not easy and have to be executed on the spot. Do or die, or do nothing.

Rey keeps her hands at her sides, her nails digging more half-crescents into her palms. Kylo grips her by the braid and levers her face towards the ceiling. He smells of blood and sweat. Her breathing starts to sync to his—a wild, panicked sort of gasping. The gloved hand gripping her hair has a barely perceptible tremor. She stares at the ceiling and tries to scrape together a plan as she feels him angle the mouth of the hilt against her sternum.

Rey feels a calmness in this moment, despite her panic. She focuses on sensing the most minute movements of his hand. When he ignites, she’ll pivot and blow him back with the Force. He might graze her in the struggle, but it won’t kill her. She’s disarmed him in training before. The tremor in his hand is stronger now. He pulls tighter at her braid and levers her head further back. She can see his shoulders shake from where he looms in the bottom of her field of vision. He’s so tall that not even wrenching her face towards the ceiling can hide him from her gaze.

_He’s hesitating._

If he were to ignite, the blade would take her right through the heart. It would cauterize, it would burn her from the inside out. Death would come quick and he would hold her through it as she seized and writhed.

He doesn’t.

 _Move, damn you,_ whispers the Sith from the dark spot inside her. _Disarm him. He’s as weak and uncertain as he’s ever been in this moment. Use that opening._

Cautiously, using the slow speed and pronounced movements she’d use with a wounded animal, Rey reaches up and wraps her hands around the hilt. She can hear his breath catch in his throat.

“I thought we’d moved past the idea of you killing me,” she says to the ceiling, tightening her grip around the hilt. Whatever had happened between now and when they’d arrived back at the compound had thrown them both back to square one, or maybe further. This was as far from square one as they could get. She’d fulfilled her end of the agreement they’d made when she got back from the temple months ago, and the reward for honoring that pact was him not killing her outright.

But a good bargainer knows that even the most honest of people can go back on their promises.

“Kylo,” she says, trying to snap him back from whatever brink he’s toeing.

Speaking his name brings him out of it. Without warning the hand gripping her braid releases and his grip on the hilt grows slack. Rey tugs the lightsaber free from his fingers and clips it back onto his belt. His hands drop to his sides, closing into fists as he stares down at the floor. Sweaty, lank strands of his hair cover his eyes. Gradually their breathing slows and Rey leans back against the window behind her for support, bracing her hands on her knees. The adrenaline coursing through her recedes, leaving her weak-limbed and shaking.

_He was going to kill me._

The thought is like a brand against her skin. Anger hits her like a shot of strong jet juice, heady and burning. Rey begins to shake harder. She looks up at him, her voice filled with a calm, quiet savagery. “Do that again and I _will_ kill you.”

Kylo looks up and meets her gaze again. He nods before walking himself back until his legs hit the edge of her bed. His body slumps into a sitting position on her mattress, bracing his elbows on his knees before cradling his head between his hands.

The danger has passed. Why there was danger in the first place is still up in the air, but she doesn’t want to broach the topic of _why_ he did that. Not right now. Her anger dissipates some as she focuses on appearing useful. Rey gives him her back as she turns to her desk, rummaging through the drawers to find the items she needs.

“What are you doing?” he slurs through his fingers. _Finally, he talks_. His voice is ragged and rough like he’s yelled himself hoarse.

This was a side of him she’d never seen before. She’s never seen this sort of vulnerability.

“You’ve bled all over yourself,” she observes, rummaging through another drawer in her desk.

Since she’d been granted more liberties in using the facilities around the complex, Rey has made a few stops by the medbay to collect useful items. Bacta patches, stim-shots—even the 21-B droid that supervised the dispensary carts allowed her a couple of doses of mild nullicaine. Force knows she needs it. All three of the knights have been putting her to task with combat drills and most days she feels like a walking bruise. Having something to heal the burns, bruises, and cuts had saves her from the worst of the pain.

Rey joins Kylo at the edge of the bed, standing in front of him. His hands fall away from his face and he lets them hang just short of brushing against her knees. He recoils at first when she comes at him with an astringent wipe, but then tips his chin up and lets her mop up the worst of the blood. The hard look on his face slackens. Life comes back into his eyes as he looks up at her. Flakes of dried blood come off with her gentle swipes, gradually revealing the wound. It’s about as wide as the width of a stylus and runs the length of his chin.

_He clipped it on something. And I’ve never known him to fall._

“Any deeper and you’d need staples to close this,” Rey says, dabbing nullicaine on the gash to deaden the pain. The tension washes out of his shoulders and Kylo almost bumps into her.

She steadies him with a hand on his shoulder. They freeze like that for a moment—her hand on his tunic that’s wet with blood, sweat, and rainwater. It feels like she’s looking at a different person versus the one that walked in with a weapon in his hand. There’s a softness around his mouth and a tired set to his eyes. She recognizes bits of herself in him.

_You’re a survivor, too._

He searches her face and seems to find something worth looking at in her eyes. But thunder rumbles overhead and the window almost shakes from it. The spell holding him pinned under her stare breaks and he glances off to the side of her.

Kylo sits up straighter, shrugging off her touch. “It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad, but not that great either,” she rebuts. “Did you trip?”

He hesitates for a moment until he finds an answer. “Something like that.”

 _Liar_ , Rey thinks.

She peels the thin film of jellied bacta off the plastoid strip in her hand. The patch goes on smoothly, adhering to his skin as an invisible bandage. If he doesn’t pull it off, the gash will be pink scar tissue by the next morning.

Rey can feel a darkness uncoiling in her like a snake. She flinches as the Sith speaks. _Not exactly the kind of disarming I had in mind, but it’ll do in a pinch_.

Kylo reaches up to grab Rey by the shoulder when she jerks abruptly away from him. The long sleeve of his tunic rides up and the barest sliver of skin brushes against her arm. His skin is warm compared to how cold and clammy hers feels from the rain and the chill of her room. _Everything about him burns._

Suddenly, the presence of the Sith in her mind is snuffed out. The dark spot in Rey recedes to a mere pinprick as something else crowds her, hot as the sun on the sands back home. She doesn’t draw away, afraid of losing that connection.

It feels the closest to peace that she’s felt in months.

 _I can’t kill her_ , Kylo’s thought echoes in her. Rey covers his gloved hand with her bare one. Like most contact between them, it lasts the lifespan of only a few heartbeats before he’s pulling away. He stands, looming over her before he brushes past on his way to the door.

The heat of the connection between them is severed, cutting quick like a knife. Just like that, the darkness rushes back in and floods her like ice water. And then _she_ creeps back in. Rey can feel her darkness rise, funneling up like a windstorm.

 _He didn’t feel anything_ , Rey realizes.

 _Of course he didn’t,_ the Sith chuckles before receding deeper. Rey can feel her slip past the sinkpoint in her mind, down that black hole she’s made for herself. The void the Sith pulls her into when she dreams.

Rey crunches up the used medical supplies in her hands. She returns to her desk and forces herself to look busy while he’s exiting.

“No ‘thanks for patching me up, Rey’?” she calls from where she’s dumping the items in her hands into her waste bin. He pauses at the door, turning to stare at her with an inscrutable look.

She has to drop everything she’s holding into the bin when he unclips his lightsaber and tosses it at her. Rey remembers how easily the double-bladed saber from the temple had lain in her hands—fitted for a woman’s grip. Kylo’s lightsaber is more unwieldy than the Sith’s old hilt, but it still fits into her palm. “Start building your own.”

The door shuts and this is all that he leaves her with. Vague instructions, a mess of wires and metal cobbled together into a lightsaber, and the strong impression that he’d been seconds away from killing her earlier—Rey tries to swallow the confusion she feels.

_One minute he’s about to end me, the next he’s trying to arm me._

She could have a fighting chance against him and the other two with this. He knew that. Yet he handed it over like it was nothing.

He knew that she couldn’t kill them after what she was shown. The First Order wasn’t her enemy.

They were her allies. They would’ve been _her_ people, had her parents survived. She wasn’t a scavenger anymore. She wasn’t _nobody_. The thought sends a thrill up her spine. For the first time since she could remember, she has a past beyond Jakku. She has a people. She has a purpose other than survival.

She turns the lightsaber over in her palms. Up close, she can observe the carbon scoring around the lateral vents at the top and the tiny silver scratches on the metal further down the hilt. He’s left her with a blueprint. That’s all she needs.

Rey slides her thumb against the switch and ignites the lightsaber. A vibration runs up the length of it, the laser screaming to life. It feels like she’s holding an extension of him, a piece of his soul that catches fire and burns bright and jagged. This is who she needs to be to carry out vengeance against the men Snoke had shown her.

A Knight of Ren.

 

* * *

 

An hour of digitally mapping the exterior schematics of the lightsaber drains Rey. She tucks the holopad under her mattress and slides Kylo’s lightsaber into a desk drawer. Outside of her window, night gives way to dawn. Murky sunlight illuminates the edges of the thunderclouds overhead, threatening to dump another load of water over the jungle spreading below the cliffside complex.

The pleasant numbness of shock is still present, but it is fastly waning. She hopes that when she crashes from coming out of it, her head is squarely resting on her pillow. That way she can avoid thinking about the memory Snoke had brought back.

She fetches her holopad out from under her mattress and tallies another day on her program before stowing it again. Day one hundred and twenty-one on Dromund Kaas. She showers and changes into fresh clothes that aren’t damp and caked with mud. Then she sits at her desk, waiting until 05:00 when the lock on her door disengages for the day.

She has, so far, taken meals in her room delivered by a protocol droid. The other three knights have yet to extend an invitation to dine with them in the galley.

So she invites herself this morning.They’ve invited themselves into her room plenty of times, so it only seems fair.

It’s not that hard to find the galley in the living quarters, despite never having been there. It is a narrow room lined with counters. The older model protocol droid that delivers her meals is busy at a burner with a pot on it. It beeps out a greeting to her in binary that she returns with a nod.

At the very back of the room, her arrival has caused something of a scene at the small, crowded table set against the wall.

“DUNEWEED!” booms Yun. He spreads his arm in her direction and beckons her over. Once the ringing in her ears dies down from Yun’s explosive shouting, she ducks around the protocol droid and makes her way towards the back.

Kylo doesn’t turn around to look at her. He keeps shoveling food into his mouth like his primary goal is to finish his breakfast and get out of the galley as soon as possible. Sariss gives her a wink and a wave, tugging out the empty chair between her and Kylo with a flick of her fingers.

“Sit here. You’ll be out of the splash zone of Yun’s messy eating that way,” the older woman confides, her tone sly. Sariss ashes a cigarette on a ceramic saucer and forks another bite off of her plate.

Rey eases into her seat, cautiously aware of Kylo to her left. He tenses when she finally situates herself but he continues to pointedly ignore her. Rey feels irritation lance at her. _He won’t even look at me._

“Is that real caf?” Rey asks, pointing towards the tall silver carafe in the middle of the table. A trail of fragrant-smelling steam gutters from the long, upturned spout.

Yun reaches for the carafe to take it by the handle, offering it to her. “Indeed. Care for a taste?”

Rey holds out the mug the protocol droid sets down for her alongside a plate of yellow, fluffy eggs. There’s some kind of fried meat to go with it. It all looks sublime, but then again she’s yet to encounter a meal on Dromund Kaas that she’d turn down. Yun pours a few sips of the dark caf into her mug.

She must have pulled quite a face during her first real sip of the stuff. Yun laughs so hard that the table shakes. Sariss hides her grin behind a long, white hand. Kylo just keeps on eating. Her irritation has escalated to full-blown annoyance.

 _Look at me_ , she wills him. But he doesn’t budge.

Sariss leans in, popping open a packet labeled _sugar_. Rey lets her pour the grainy contents into her mug. “Pretty bitter when you take it that black. Not to worry. Once we’re back with the fleet, you’ll be able to get actual cream added in.”

The sugar Sariss adds sweetens the brew enough to where Rey can enjoy the taste. She finishes her caf and sets the mug aside before following Kylo’s lead in destroying whatever is on her plate.

She’ll beat him to cleaning her plate if it kills her. Maybe if she finishes before him, he’ll have to look her in the eye and actually speak to her. Ignoring her after the exchange in her room is like a slap in the face.

More than likely he’ll get up and leave the table without a word spoken to any of them, but she’s willing to hedge her bets on a more optimistic outcome.

The three of them that are speaking exchange pleasantries—or what passes for them. Sariss quizzes her with questions about politics and history. Yun tells her about his latest scouting trip to the fringe of the jungle where it opens up into swamplands, and the beasts he saw there. Both Sariss and Yun pointedly avoid looking directly at Kylo’s face. _And are pointedly avoiding any questions about last night._

“These don’t taste anything like the eggs I’ve had here,” Rey states, lifting her fork to eye level. These taste fresher, less stale and with more consistency to them.

“Actual eggs—not rehydrated eggs in a bag. They came down in a recent supply probe. Someone likes us up there,” Yun answers her around a mouthful of eggs. Some of them spray onto his plate as he speaks. Sariss shoots him a murderous scowl from across the table.

The sound of Kylo setting down his fork makes the other three at the table with him stop chattering. “Another two knights have died since I checked in with High Command last month,” Kylo finally speaks.

 _Finally._ Relief courses through her. She thought he’d leave without a word. The clatter of cutlery stops. Rey takes her cue from Sariss and Yun, setting her fork down on her plate like they do before turning her full attention on Kylo. She’s beginning to understand that when the Commander speaks, he gets the room.

Sariss counts on her fingers. “That brings our total down to twelve,” she mutters. “I’m counting the two we had to knock off from sending assassins down here to kill Rey. Eight dead in four months.” Sariss runs a hand back through her hair, mussing it. She leans and tips her chair on its back legs to stare at the ceiling in contemplation. “Should we advance another selection pool forward? With our numbers thinning out like this, it’s probably not prudent to wait a couple of years like we normally do. I doubt the Supreme Leader will allow us to take that kind of time to train someone new, though. Not so soon.”

 _Someone was trying to kill me already_. _Other Knights_ , Rey gathers, stirring the remains of her breakfast on her plate. _But they killed them._ She glances up to look at the three around her. _They didn’t let that happen. They didn’t put them before me. I came first._

“What do you think we should do?” Kylo speaks, his gaze leveled at the wall across from them. It takes Rey a moment to figure out that he’s addressing her.

All three of them turn to face her.

Heat creeps up her neck. The pressure mounts as she takes in the expectant looks on their faces. But she gathers up her scant knowledge of the Knights and starts to formulate an answer for him.

“I agree in part with Sariss. I think that we should continue on and only begin a new selection pool when numbers really count,” she advises him. Kylo nods, urging her on. Rey feels surer of herself. “The Supreme Leader isn’t going to let us spend another half-year training more. Not when there’s a war coming.”

“A smart answer. You’ll go far, kid,” Yun says approvingly from his end of the table, pointing his fork at Rey. He resumes demolishing his pile of eggs. The protocol droid is having a hard time keeping him supplied, ferrying new eggs back and forth from the burner to Yun.

Sariss’s grin is sharp and bright. “She thinks like you do,” she tells Kylo, pointing from him to Rey, as if drawing an invisible line in the air between them.

Kylo’s nod towards Rey isn’t much, but it speaks volumes to her. Approval. Pride. Even a corner of his mouth twitches up before he turns back to address the others.

Rey sinks into the conversation, immersing herself in the details that fly back and forth. Overnight, her status has evolved. Rey _belongs_ and it’s all at once terrifying and wonderful. She’s being pulled firmly into the fold, rising in rank.

A Ren.

 

 

 

**End of Act II: The Adherent**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is having a great holiday season and accepts my humble gift of an update. I’m officially off hiatus and am looking forward to finishing this story and updating it as often as I can. As you all might’ve noticed, the tags have been updated to reflect the fact that this fic is going to pull heavily from details revealed in _The Last Jedi_ , so beware of spoilers if you haven’t already seen that film.
> 
>  _TLJ_ largely changed my approach to how I am going to finish out this fic (that and inspiration from talking with the brilliant women known as [ricca_riot](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot) and [LovelyThings](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyThings) who also beta read this chapter). I look forward to writing it all out.
> 
> This fic has cover art done by [Elithien](http://elithien.tumblr.com). The look Knights of Ren!Rey will sport is based on that beautiful art. [Check it out here.](http://elithien.tumblr.com/post/161060420831/elithien-commissioned-fanfic-cover-for-the)


	11. ACT III: Attrition, Part I

**Act III: Attrition, Part I**

 

 **R** ey jams the twin handles on the speeder bike forward until they lock into place. The bike, a stripped-down 74-Z that was probably in its prime thirty years ago, lurches forward. Green trees and thick undergrowth blur in the weak afternoon light as the slender craft bolts down the narrow trail. She flattens herself on the chassis of the vehicle and keeps a steady grip on the handles.

Everything is muted beneath her helm. The wind drags at her clothing, but it can’t reach her face. The aural receptors in the helm dampen the roar of the speeder’s afterburner to a low thrum. The quiet is both eerie and tranquil all at once, sharpening her vision to a keen edge.

She is trying to accustom herself to wearing her smooth, featureless helm more often. The weight of it is becoming familiar. It kept her hands free by filtering her comm-feed directly into her ears and the various HUD functions are addictively useful. The mask has yet to grow in meaning for her besides being a useful tool.

 _It’ll block blaster fire and keep you alive if you pair it with a flight suit and life support unit. That way if you get spaced…_ Yun had trailed off after explaining that function of the helm to her.

 _So don’t get spaced?_ Rey had taken the helm from him.

 _Don’t get spaced_ , Yun left it at that.

She’s done well on flight simulations thus far. The shoddy holoterminal in her bolthole back on Jakku had been good practice for the sleeker, more advanced sims she has access to on her new terminal.

Rey hopes that the top-scoring simulations translate to successful piloting—or at least, successful enough to avoid obliteration.

Keeping her center of mass as low to the bike as possible, she unlocks the handles with another click and pulls them back towards her. The deceleration is so abrupt that she’s nearly thrown back in her seat, but she keeps her head low and body forward. Rey sits up, leans to her right, and puts her weight into the footrest. The speeder starts a hairpin turn and glides around the bulky, gnarled tree trunk blocking the her path. It’s a fluid, practiced move borne from years of piloting her own speeder back on Jakku. But on this rainy world she has to worry less about steering around debris hidden under piles of sand and more about navigating through the maze of trees.

As soon as the speeder bike skids around the tree, she steers the bike back onto the path and throws the handles forward. Rey whoops in delight as the acceleration nearly lifts her out of her seat. She flattens herself on the bike again and holds on. The tiny line of her heart monitor spikes in the corner of her HUD. Rey ignores it and lets herself get lost in piloting the speeder, turning sharp corners and dodging tree trunks. Adrenaline floods her veins and her heart rate climbs higher and higher on the monitor.

Daily, she tries to set aside time for this. But there’s no distraction good enough to keep the unwanted thoughts from eventually creeping back to her.

It’s been a month and a half since her meeting with the Supreme Leader. Since joining the Knights of Ren, Rey no longer has a lock on her door. She has free rein of the complex and can leave it for hours at a time if she wishes. Access to the First Order databases via her holoterminal has opened up and she now has her own security clearances. She reviews mission briefings that Kylo forwards to her messages every day. Sariss shows her flimsies full of First Order military strategy and assures her to follow Kylo’s lead—she’ll learn more from him in the field than reading anything. Yun has got her running flight simulation after flight simulation until she wakes up tugging at her sheets like a control yolk in a TIE fighter.

Kylo says her name more times than she can count in a day. Their hands brush often, gloved but still touching, as he guides her through the more difficult aspects of constructing an extended power field conductor in the long hilt taking shape on her workbench. She’s long since turned his saber back over to him after finishing the schematics to reference.

All of these moments fill her with something that comes as close to happiness as she’s ever felt—a quiet contentment of finding her place in all of this.

With the best moments came the most unpleasant, and they were sharp and bitter with a pronounced thorniness to them. They dig into her and keep her awake at night, tossing in a cold sweat as she works herself from anger, to frustration, to sadness, and then back again to anger. Some nights she will give up on trying to sleep and go to the training room, beating back combat droids in round after round until she’s exhausted enough to crawl back to her room and finally rest.

She has not spoken to Supreme Leader Snoke since that horrible night, where he unraveled that part of her memory she’d kept shuttered away for so long. Requesting an audience was out of the question. Kylo had assured her that she could only speak to the Supreme Leader when called for and it largely worked the same for the rest of them. So she waited. And waited.

Force, she _hates_ waiting with a viciousness. Rey jams back the handles she’s gripping, putting her anger into cutting around an even bigger tree trunk than the last with a sharp jolt of speed. It’s a stupid, reckless move to execute, but she feels better coming out of the difficult turn than she did going into it. She rights the speeder and accelerates again, leaning her body over the bike.

Rey still could not fetch back the faintest memory of her mother’s voice or her father’s face—everything about them were mere afterthoughts. She wrote it off as her mind still barring her from that, only accessible through Snoke’s guidance. So she tried different ways to access it. Hours of meditation. But it was as if she was met with an obstinate wall she could not overtake. The Sith was no help either when she tried to solicit her for help. _Cryptic as ever._

The unwelcome visitor in her mind grew more reclusive by the day, shuttering herself off in the place she had made for herself. Sometimes Rey forgets she is even burdened with her, but then she will lay her head down and dream herself into that void where the Sith waits for her like a hunting sand spider. Feeling powerless in her own mind while she sleeps, not certain when she’ll be drawn into another encounter with the Sith—this is one of her many fears. Rey feels pinned like an insect under her whims.

 _It’s unlikely that I’ll manage to shove her out anytime soon. If I even_ **_can_** _._

Darker thoughts sit under the layers she peels back with that thought. Rey remembers of Niima and what the First Order did there, of what _Kylo_ did there to eliminate any chance of the First Order’s presence being spoken about. There weren’t many that she cared about in that dusty outpost, but not every last one of them deserved to die. _Security containment,_ Kylo had called it. The Supreme Leader’s policy of eliminating all witnesses when the First Order’s operations might be exposed. Rey tries to imagine putting an entire outpost to death and feels her stomach lurch. But then she envisions the men Snoke had shown her and imagines it would bring her some measure of pleasure, to undo the people that put her on Jakku.

She’s killed before. She can do it again. Rey feels her hands squeeze over the handles and push them further forward, accelerating faster along the trail.

Over time, she has recognized that her mind was being made into a maze. Not unlike this jungle, it sprawled out in endless directions that rambled on without sense or order. Then other spots were dark, pitiless depths she dared not go near. But most confusing were the spots that seemed unreachable and unknowable like the part that Snoke so easily pried open only to shut again.

A long, uninterrupted stretch of trail comes up. Rey eases back on the accelerator and lets the speeder bike slow down. She forcibly pulls her thoughts away from her troubles and focuses on the world around her.

She glides over the gnarled roots and black, loamy earth criss-crossing the path and feels a oneness with what’s around her. Energy, bright and vibrant, meets her when she reaches out with the Force, a reflex she’s done a thousand times a day and will do a thousand times tomorrow. Rey can feel the death and decay saturating the ground, nourishing the roots and tendrils of the plants that reach down into it to dredge that energy, a blinding force that rekindles as it branches out into fronds and blades and limbs. A cycle.

 _Lovely_ , she thinks, almost inclined to shut her eyes and soak it in.

A warning beep snaps her wandering focus back to piloting the speeder bike.

 _DISTANCE TO OBJECT: 20 METERS_ read the display once her eyes train on a particular tree blocking the bike’s path. The distance whittles down before she executes a small turn to avoid crashing headlong into the tree.

She watches out of the corner of her eye as the speedometer readout on her HUD climbs.

_70._

_72._

_80._

_87._

“ _You’re gonna end up as a grease stain on a tree trunk if you don’t slow down,_ ” Kylo warns through her comm-feed. The helm’s aural relays filter his voice directly into her ears. Rey pulls back on the abruptly on the accelerator knob, breaking before his warning can become reality. Her breathing is loud in her helm as she brings the front of her speeder bike to idle just before the bulk of the tree, slamming back on the handles to lock the speeder bike into park.

“ _You still alive?_ ” His sarcasm-laden voice fills her aural feed.

“You scared the kriff out of me is all,” she snaps. He did surprise her—he’s never comm’d her when she was out piloting. No one did. This was one hour out of her day that they didn’t monopolize with training exercises. Rey tries to even out her breathing and calm her racing heart.

He pauses long enough for her to get her breathing under control. Her heartbeat gradually drops and she takes in the scenery around her. This part of the trail runs parallel to the lake that the waterfall near the the complex empties into. She can see the vehicle bay’s blast doors just to the right of the falling water, buried in the rocky face of the cliff.

Kylo’s voice reverberates over the feed again. “ _Where are you?_ ” His earlier sarcasm is gone. Now he sounds almost hesitant, as if he knows he’s intruding on something private.

She pauses before answering, “Near the edge of the basin. Almost back to the compound.” Rey starts fiddling with the pressure clasps at the back of the helm, ready to pry it off her head and feel the fresh air hit her face.

“ _Send me your coordinates._ ” Rey’s become somewhat of an expert in interpreting his tone of voice these days. He phrases this as more of a request than a demand—optional.

Planting her hands behind her on the seat of the bike, she leans back on them and looks at the lake. _It’s probably something important_ , she decides. _Something he wants to tell me in person_. She feels her heart jump, something close to excitement closing off her throat.

An audience with the Supreme Leader? Updated intelligence on the location of Major Ematt?

The possibilities fly around her head as her eyes dart up to the left corner of her HUD. The tech picks up her movements and she blinks her way through the command prompts to relay her coordinates to Kylo. A hiss of air fills her ears as she frees the pressure clamps on her helm, lifting it off her face. Rey runs a hand through her sweaty hair and surveys the lake just to her left. She dismounts the bike, pulling her braid out of the knot she has it in.

It takes him half an hour to arrive, much of which she spends pacing a line into the lake’s rocky shore. When she does hear him powering down his speeder bike’s afterburners where she’s parked her own, Rey’s gotten bored with walking, and perches on the trunk of a fallen tree. Engrossed in the pages of her journal and trying to look as busy as possible, she focuses on the sheet before her and jots down a few words on the blank page.

The small stack of paper, bound together with twine, is courtesy of a request she made of Sariss.

 _A rare thing, documenting on paper. Don’t know many who still do it_ , the older woman had noted before handing Rey a sheaf of paper from a drawer in the hololibrary.

She tries to emanate calm, even disinterest. Pelting him with questions isn’t the way to get quick answers out of Kylo. There’s an entire method to getting information out of the closed-off man she knows as her commander. Rey moves her stylus to start a new paragraph and writes out a line.

_The trees here can grow as high as thirty meters. Their root systems are complex and each tree has thousands of plants growing on its branches. Easy to climb, they’re good hiding spots if you encounter something keen on making a lunch out of you…_

Writing in this makeshift journal is another distraction she has acquired this last month and a half. It was how she killed time back home: jotting down the constellations overhead, etching out the shape of downed star destroyers, making notes about her surroundings.

Scribbling on blank pages is what Rey is used to—stripping scavenged hard copies of Imperial manuals of their ink with a mild solvent to leave them clear for her to write in. It’s how she taught herself back on Jakku, using blank sheets to draw and write out basic sentences from primers found on her terminal. If there was no paper, she would use a stick or a metal rod to scratch out lines in the sand.

A family of small white birds nesting a couple of meters above her in the boughs of a dark-wooded tree. She’s noticed them on a couple of her rides that take her by this particular tree. They stick out amidst the greenery, out of place on a world filled with reptiles and other scaly creatures. Small chirps and tweets come from the nest.

She hears the crunch of boots treading on leaves behind her. Kylo, a towering dark shape in the corner of her eye, takes a seat next to her after he hikes his leg over the fallen log. He’s back in his old clothes, not the loose-fitting training blacks everyone in the compound wears. His helm is placed between them with a pronounced thud as it hits the wood.

 _He only dresses like this when he’s on holocalls_.

“How did you know how fast I was going?” she asks, keeping her attention on the page in her lap. A sketch of a tree is starting to take shape on the page. Rey draws a small circle and starts detailing it to resemble one of the plump birds perched on the branch overhead.

“Command access.” Kylo reaches to tap the top of his helm.

“Why’d you ask me for my coordinates if you can already see them?” Rey can’t help but angle an irate glare at him, her stylus pausing on the page.

Kylo rolls his shoulders in a shrug, the fabric of his cowl scrunching with the movement. “Letting you exercise your right to privacy, I guess,” he says. She can see the corner of his mouth barely twitch—his version of a smirk. This was the easiest part of their conversations. Banter like this has become neutral ground, something familiar that they could relax into despite all that had transpired between them.

“You’re a funny man, Kylo Ren.” She motions at a stone near her foot and lobs it at him with the Force. He deflects it with a flick of his hand before it can hit him in the shin and sends it skimming across the lake’s surface. She counts five skips before it finally loses speed and sinks into the water with a _plop_.

Rey lets out an appreciative whistle, staring at the ripples made by the stone. “That takes skill.”

“Childhood pastime,” he explains, taking her helm from where she has it sitting to the left of him. Rey goes quiet and focuses instead on the page in her lap, the small white bird gradually taking form on the branch she’s sketched.

 _That’s the first time he’s mentioned anything about a childhood_.

She keeps her mouth shut and hopes the silence invites him to say more about it.

Instead, he reaches for his helm and her own, balancing the hunk of metal in his lap. There’s a _beep_ that sounds from his after he clicks down on something in the helm. Her helm chirps in response.

“Now you can see my readouts. I was going to pair them eventually,” he is careful to add, glancing sidelong at her.

Rey feels heat creep up her neck. _He trusts me enough to do this._ She quashes that thought and turns her helm over in her hands, peering into the narrow visor. “Makes sense if we’re going to be watching each others’ backs out there,” she reasons, setting her helm down to her right. “Any idea what these are?”

Kylo looks up. She can see the tiny lines form around his dark eyes as he squints. Recognition dawns on his face, quickly wiped away by indifference. “Carioka bird. They’re native to Alderaan. _Were_ , rather,” he corrects himself. His hands tighten into fists against his knees.

Something in his voice makes her pause. When he offers nothing further, she applies the stylus to the thin parchment in the journal and teases out a few tiny lines that resemble a feather. Heat creeps up her neck again as he watches her bare hands move across the page.

Being the object of Kylo’s focus was just shy of distracting—he was single-minded in his observation of her most of the time, as if what surrounded them didn’t interest him at all. After that night many weeks ago, something has shifted in him.

He was often the first person she saw in the morning and the last she saw in the evening before heading back to her room. It was as if a new side to him had opened for her alone, someone who was attentive in what she had to say rather than disinterested. His bone-dry humor had come out in full and Rey had found herself trading verbal spars back and forth with the commander. Their conversations could run on for hours and their training sessions could stretch on for longer.

“How do you think they got here?” Rey finally breaks the silence. If he stares at her any longer, she’s sure to combust under the scrutiny. _What do you see?_ She wants to yell it in his face, to finally unravel the confusing tangle of emotions wrapped around her perception of him.

Kylo shrugs, glancing across the lake. “They’re probably pets imported thousands of years ago when there still was something resembling a civilization on Dromund Kaas.”

“They’re survivors, then.” Rey finishes off the sketch. Now there’s a decently rendered bird sitting on the branch she’s drawn on the page. She writes _Carioka_ just beneath the drawing of the round, white bird. Rey holds up the makeshift journal and turns it to face him.

“How long have you been doing this?” he asks, reaching to take it from her. His gloved fingers turn through the pages. He pauses to read the neat, slanting handwriting sprawled across one page she’s finished on the lightning spires spread throughout the jungle.

He taps a line next to a diagram of a spire, turning the page towards her so she can see which line he’s pointing at.

_Tip: Do NOT climb these._

Kylo’s mouth twitches at the corner. She rolls her eyes and grabs the journal from him.

Rey makes a show of brushing off a speck of dirt from the page. “I’ve been scribbling in journals for as long as I can remember,” she admits, trying to recall the first journal she wrote. It’s probably sitting on a shelf gathering dust in her bolthole with the rest of them. “I started writing about what I saw around me, then when I filled up those journals I started drawing what I saw in the margins. Notes, tips for anyone that might pick it up if something happened to me on Jakku.” It had always been in the back of her mind—the likelihood of dying on that planet. Journals had been her way of ensuring that not all of her would be gone if something were to happen. A written testament that she had existed.

“You’re very good at it, actually,” he says quietly.

Heat climbs back up her neck again at the compliment. She brushes off the small bubble of pride at having made something remarkable enough for even him to notice and focuses on closing her journal, stowing it next to her helm with the stylus clipped on its edge. “I’ll mark this down in the books. An actual _compliment_ from Commander Ren.”

He shifts his gaze from her face to the lake, leaning forward to let his hands hang between his spread knees. “High Command relayed a message this morning,” he says, glancing towards the ground. Rey starts to hang on to his every word, anxiety coiling in her gut. _They’re not splitting us up, are they?_ ”You’ll be joining me on the _Finalizer_ when it comes by for pickup in two weeks. Sariss and Yun are rejoining the third fleet on the _Vengeance_. The _Finalizer_ is to meet with the _Supremacy_ after we make it back to First Order space and the both of us are due for an audience with the Supreme Leader.”

Relief courses through her. _They’re not splitting us up. Not now, at least._ As complicated as he is, Kylo is the first and most familiar person in her life. Losing him now and being sent to another command post would not break her, but it would be difficult.

He would grow distant as the millions of stars that would separate them multiplied. The tentative connection between them would break. Part of her would harden into something hateful. All of this would transpire—she knows this as a fact and still she doesn’t quite understand _how_ she does.

“Two more weeks,” she says, more to herself than him.

Two more weeks until she sees the Supreme Leader in person. Then she can ask her questions. The thought of her parents hangs over her, spectral and faceless. _Who were they, what did they do, why did Major Ematt target them?_

“You think you’re ready for it?”

“Were you ever ready for it?” she shoots back, glancing up at him. Rey watches his mouth twist into a frown as he looks out over the water, his expression flat.

“No,” he finally admits. “But you’ll manage like I did.”

“Then I’m ready,” she resolves, crossing one leg over the other before leaning back on her hands. _If he can do it, so can I._

Kylo reaches across her, grabbing up her journal before unclipping the stylus from the pages. He flicks it open to the unfinished page about the bird and starts writing. Long, curving lines trail from the stylus as his hand moves across the lower half of the page. “What is that?”

He doesn’t answer. It takes him only a few moments to finish, but when he hands the stylus and journal back to her, his work is evident. _Rey_ dominates the page in a bold, flowing script.

“How’d you learn to write like this?” She’s surprised that something so lovely can come from his hand. He hasn’t shown any interest in anything remotely resembling art, but that’s what this is—a name that is made beautiful on the page.

Kylo swings his leg over the log and stands. For a moment she thinks he’ll blow off her question and leave without another word, but he stops himself after walking a few paces towards the path. Rey sees him unclench his fists, some of the always-present tension draining from his shoulders. “My mother insisted.” He almost hesitates on the word, facing away from her. She knows that if he were facing her, she’d be able to pick out the tell-tale signs of pain he’s trying to mask beneath his monotone.

“What is she like?” she yells after him, his strides carrying him further out of earshot.

“Stubborn,” he calls over his shoulder, making his way back to where his speeder bike is parked by the path. He doesn’t correct her tense. _He has a mother somewhere_. Rey watches him clamp his helm back over his head before mounting the vehicle.

“Go figure. Like mother, like son,” she mutters, turning back to the page. She picks up the stylus and scrawls her name underneath his rendering. It’s small and plain below his handwriting.

“It’s beautiful, by the way,” she calls after him before she hears his afterburners roar to life. He doesn’t respond and the roar of the bike’s engines fade as he accelerates down the path.

The _Rey_ in their respective scripts sit dangerously close to one another on the page. She shuts the journal before she has any more time to think about it.

 

* * *

 

Sariss and her lessons have become more of an open-ended question and answer session that occur for a few hours every day after lunch. It fills the time between flight simulations and sparring drills. There’s a week to go until their departure date and the older woman has professed she has nothing more to teach Rey than what she already knows, or _will_ know through experience.

The tall blonde is busy powering down the vast databanks that form the perimeter of the hololibrary, running through encryption programs on her datapad. Rey watches as Sariss gently taps her booted foot against one of the databanks, fidgeting as the program finishes scrambling all the information it holds. Her eyes drift away from the other woman’s robed form and towards the holoprojection on the table in the middle of the room. The volume is muted and a vid from a popular HoloNet news network plays as she reads on her datapad.

Rey loses interest in the article about Class II hyperdrives on her datapad, setting it aside as the vid playing on the projector pans from a documentary on a renovation project for a civic building on Chandrila to footage of an animated speaker orating to a large crowd in the senate building on Hosnian Prime.

Sariss finishes her encryption and moves over to the other side of the room, passing between Rey’s chair and the table where the new projection hovers.

A pale, brunette woman with her hair done up in an elaborate, braided twist gestures towards the off-camera crowd. Her image shimmers and Rey can see some streaks of grey at her temples. With a sweep of her arm, the wide sleeve of her robe glides across the holoprojection.

Rey watches the woman for a few minutes. Something is familiar about her around the eyes, but she can’t place where she’s seen it echoed. “I’ve noticed her clips being replayed a couple of times during ’Net news reels. What’s her name again?” she asks Sariss over the beeping noises coming from the databanks.

Sariss glances over at her, busy at the one workbench present in the room. Rey feels something close to fear squeeze around her heart as she spots the holocron hovering in a stasis cube on the surface of it. The other knight looks at the projection and suddenly grins in recognition. “You’ve heard her mentioned in a few of the briefings thus far, I’d imagine. That right there is General Organa. Formally titled Princess Leia of Alderaan. Leader of the Resistance, location unknown.”

The leader of the Resistance. She had overseen the advancement of Caluan Ematt up the ranks of the Rebellion years ago. General Organa had brought him on as a major in the Resistance. Anger unfurls in her, sluggish at first but gradually building the clearer his face comes to her mind. There’s another face to pair with his: Organa’s. She forces herself to breathe, unclenching her hands from where they’ve closed around the chair’s arms. There are dents in the metal from where her fingers have squeezed with the Force.

Sariss doesn’t seem to take notice. Her attention is on the muted holoprojection. She spends a few moments watching it before turning back to the stasis cube on the workbench. “Those are old clips from when she was a senator, though,” she explains to Rey, “She had a bit of a falling out with the Galactic Senate. There was a scandal about four years ago that destroyed her political career.”

Rey feels curiosity prick at her. “What was the scandal about?”

Sariss, who always seems to have an answer for everything, shrugs dismissively. “That’s best researched on your own time, I believe…” she trails off, focusing instead on packing up the object on the workbench. The stasis cube is enclosed in another larger metal cube.

Rey watches as the container with the holocron held within is levitated into a metal packing crate before Sariss seals it.

 

* * *

 

_RANGE TO TARGET: 200 METERS_

The shot isn’t impossible. But it’s made difficult by the jerky movements of the combat droid. It’s on a random path, moving at a quick clip through the trees in the jungle basin. Her helm’s functions are paying off right now. She can track the droid as if it’s standing only a meter from her.

Rey lays on the lip of the cliff, bringing the butt of the blaster rifle against her shoulder. It’s an older B-20 model and isn’t the most accurate. She has to overcompensate by pulling her shots to the right in order to hit her target.

Yun stands over her, watching the droid through his own helm’s targeting systems.

“Just pretend it’s Resistance scum,” Yun’s voice filters directly into her ears through her aural receptors.

The droid’s head is in her rifle’s crosshairs. It’s a good hundred and eighty-seven meter shot now, according to her HUD’s measurements. She squeezes on the trigger and feels barely any recoil from the blaster rifle as it fires. The droid’s head explodes in a shower of shrapnel and sparks, collapsing onto the jungle floor in a twitching heap. Rey switches the safety on her blaster rifle back on, pushing herself off her stomach to kneel on the wet ground.

“That did it, scrapper.” Yun offers his hand out to her. Rey doesn’t even need to lift herself off the ground. The big man just has to tug his hand back and suddenly she’s upright and trying not to stumble. She clutches the rifle across her chest, adjusting the strap so it hangs comfortably from her shoulder and won’t tangle in the slick fabric of her cowl.

Last night someone had deposited new combat wear on her bed—thin, pliable armorweave that covers Rey from the nape of her neck to her ankles and fits like a glove. A gambeson made out of a heavy, blaster-resistant fabric like Kylo’s goes over that, dropping to mid-thigh.

Rey didn’t have to venture a guess as to who had left the parcel of gear sitting on her bed. She had smiled to herself, turning the finely crafted pieces of fabric and leatheris over in her hands.

There’s a faint imitation of her old wraps from Jakku in how a top layer of fabric crosses over her chest on the gambeson. Boots and a wide belt accompanies the gear, even a cowl to cover her head with. The fabric of the cowl is long enough to wrap around her shoulders and drop like a sash across her back. Rey has had to stop herself over the course of the day from glancing behind her when she feels it flap against the small of her back. She blinks to clear her HUD of readouts so she has an uninterrupted view out of her helm’s visor.

“I think that’s enough for the day,” Yun declares, shifting his own blaster rifle onto his other shoulder. The two of them walk back from the edge of the cliff and start towards the tree line. Today has been leisurely compared to the others. Packing has concluded and she only has to throw a few items into the durasteel crates holding her possessions. Her lightsaber hilt, nearing completion, rests in a reinforced case by her bed. She will be carrying it onto their shuttle come the morning.

“Any advice for me before you and Sariss break off from us tomorrow?” She’s speaking to the back of his cowled head, picking her way over the vine-littered ground as they make for the nearest footpath that leads down to the jungle basin below.

“I’ve loads of pointers for you, duneweed,” Yun rumbles at her from over his shoulder. The vocoder of his helm pitches his deep voice even lower. “The first of which is to not be afraid to slap around any back-talking officer that questions your methods. Elsewise they’re likely to start walking all over you. You don’t have to put them in the infirmary, but a little choke with the Force goes a long way in making the right impression with those sorts getting high-handed ideas that our ways are substandard to their own.”

“The commander has brought up the fact that General Hux might be a problem for me. Would he be included?” It’s been made very clear as to who Kylo’s least favorite person on the _Finalizer_ is. She’s been warned about showing any whiff of weakness around the red-headed general who runs his operations from the _Finalizer_.

“Him, no. He’s within High Command. Consider everyone in High Command off-limits. Only the Supreme Leader can _motivate_ people in High Command. Everyone under High Command? Fair game.”

 _Motivate_.

Rey remembers wiping blood off of Kylo’s ruined chin and feels the pit of her stomach drop.

 

* * *

 

Her final day on Dromund Kaas dawns as gloomy as the ones prior. The sky is the same duracrete grey as it was when she arrived here six months ago. She steps onboard the ramp to the _Upsilon-_ class command shuttle and moves out of the way of a pair of stormtroopers carrying a large transport crate between them. Another command shuttle idles besides theirs in the wide, grassy field.

Everything coming with them has been stored into packing crates and dropped off at the landing zone by the complex’s droids. Rey and Kylo watch as the handful of stormtroopers that have come down with the shuttle carry up one crate after the other until everything is loaded.

Rey keeps the long, slender case containing her saber held tightly in one hand. She glances at the jungle around them through her helm’s visor, trying to commit this scene to memory.

Part of her died on this world. But what had died has been reborn and remade into something stronger. She had a purpose now and people to call her own.

Rey knows her place in all of this.

The shuttle opposite theirs starts powering their engines up from idle. The stormtroopers that came with it start pre-flight checks around the perimeter of the ship before marching single-file up its ramp. Yun and Sariss, clad in their full armor, pass the stormtroopers on their way out of the shuttle, walking the short distance to where she and Kylo stand by their own ship.

“Knights of Ren,” Yun shouts over the roar of the engines. Rey notices their shuttle has also started its sublight engines. “I’ll be brief since I’m terrible at goodbyes.”

_It’s time._

“I’ll never forget what you two have shown me,” she yells, holding her hand up towards her covered face in a half-salute. They mirror it by touching two fingers to their helms, perfectly in sync.

Yun reaches out to clap his hand to her shoulder, giving her a hard shake. Rey reaches up and covers his massive hand. “The Force is strong with you, Rey of Jakku.”

“The Force is with you.” Sariss switches to a comm-feed to say it instead of shouting it. Her calm, clear voice overpowers the sound of the engines as it filters directly into Rey’s hearing.

“The Force is with us,” she echoes back over her comm-feed. The two knights turn and begin their way back to their shuttle. Rey feels Kylo reach up to squeeze her shoulder, drawing away before one of their stormtroopers can see the gesture.

When everyone has boarded and the ground drops away outside of the red-tinged viewport of the command shuttle, Rey is hit with the sudden sensation of loss that she can’t quite place. She might’ve had the worst time of her life down there on that dark, hellish planet. But the experiences strengthened her in a way Jakku never did. Those experiences were set in motion by the people who set out to make her stronger. Sariss. Yun.

_Kylo._

The other command shuttle with Sariss and Yun aboard drifts further and further away as they climb high into the clouds.

She walks back from the viewport and straps herself into the jumpseat beside Kylo when it disappears from sight, tucking the lightsaber’s case into her lap. The handful of stormtroopers accompanying them are in the aft compartment in the shuttle, belted into their own transport seats. Only herself, Kylo, and the transport pilot sit in the main cockpit.

Only a minute of flight time passes before the pilot is easing them out of the planet’s atmosphere and into open space. The clouds thin out, grey overtaken by deep, dark blue that fades to black. Stars wink into existence and speckle the void that yawns outside of the ship’s viewport. Rey is pressed back into her seat as the gravitational forces press down on her before the pilot eases forward on the thrusters. They accelerate up and break the planet’s pull on them.

Kylo is as solid as a rock beside her. His hands rest on the arms of the jumpseat and he barely makes any movement as they level out. Up ahead, Rey can make out shapes blocking out the light of the stars. Far to the right is one of the moons of Dromund Kaas, thrown into shadow by the position of the planet.

The closer they draw, the clearer the shapes become. Rey can’t mistake the dagger-like shapes for anything else. They’re destroyers. She can pick out the familiar shape of the _Finalizer_ as it slowly cruises into view. The shuttle picks up some speed as the pilot hurries them along towards it.

But the larger, longer shadow sitting next to the _Finalizer_ is what has her interest. Rey unbuckles herself from the jumpseat, pacing close to the viewport to get a clearer look. The pilot, only a few paces to her right, freezes before focusing on the task at hand.

She tries not to pry into the man’s mind, but she doesn’t need the Force to feel the waves of anxiety coming off of him. _We make him nervous_.

The long shadow just behind the _Finalizer_ is a ship. Massive. A dreadnought. She remembers mapping out the length of the _Ravager_ back on Jakku. It was at least nineteen kilometers long—this ship looks like it matches meter for meter, even from this distance.

“Which ship is that?” Her voice is metallic and grating after the vocoder of her helm scrambles it. No amount of softening her tone can change it. She watches the pilot’s shoulders twitch at the sound.

The man clears his throat before answering her. “The _Vengeance_. Fleet Admiral Daala’s flagship, Lieutenant Commander Ren.” It takes her a moment to realize he’s addressing her by rank.

She switches to her private comm-line to relay her unfiltered voice only to Kylo’s helm, sparing the pilot. “That’s an _Executor_ -class. I thought most of those were lost in the last war.”

“They managed to save a few.”

The closer they draw, the more massive the ship appears. The hull gleams almost black from this angle. She tries to remember the _Ravager_ ’s remains back on Jakku and falls utterly short in comparing it to the ship that spreads before her. A dreadnought’s shattered remains don’t hold a candle to seeing one in flight. She can see the tiny dot of Sariss and Yun’s shuttle disappear into one of its vast docking bays.

The _Finalizer_ draws closer.

Kylo’s voice on their comm-line interupts her reverie. “Welcome to the fleet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, readers! Have a nice long chapter to kick the year off right.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading/commenting/kudo'ing/bookmarking. It gives me the biggest boost to open up my inbox and see comments waiting for me. Hopefully I get to reply to those waiting for me on the last chapter soon.
> 
> I think it's safe to say that Rey's finished her transition into her new role as a Knight of Ren. As the title might suggest, she'll be seeing some action in the upcoming chapters of the Resistance scum variety. Buckle up.
> 
> I owe the highest of fives and the biggest of props to the lovely [ricca_riot](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot/pseuds/ricca_riot) for beta reading this chapter.
> 
> **LORE LINKS**
> 
> The [74-Z speeder bike](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/74-Z_speeder_bike) saw a lot of use during the Galactic Civil War. It was the primary mode of personal transport for Imperials on the forest moon of Endor. 
> 
> The [Vengeance](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vengeance_\(Executor-class\)) is an Executor-class Star Dreadnought that once served in the Imperial Navy. Thought to have perished in the Battle of Nocto in 3 ABY, this ship has obviously made its way into First Order hands in this story.
> 
> [Rey has indeed kept a canonic journal in the past while on Jakku. She wrote it all in the High Galactic alphabet.](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rey's_survival_guide) Kylo also seems to have had a history of penmanship as revealed in _The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary_ re: Ben Solo's calligraphy set. He probably has some pretty bitchin' handwriting.


End file.
